Handy Tool For Manipulating PDF Files
Now that Open Office is a standard installation on Linux, Mac & PC desktops the ease of generating PDF documents has increased dramatically. No longer do we require Adobe Writer to be installed just to produce a PDF file.
However, there’s still a gap between producing PDF’s and basic manipulation of PDF files. In my case, the most common requirement is to combine 2 or more PDF files into a single PDF. Useful when attaching combining written documents with scanned images.
I encountered this problem recently and was determined to locate a free & open source solution (isn’t PDF/PS an open standard anyway?).
pdftk to the rescue! A really handy utility which runs on a variety of platforms, including: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and Solaris. And it works like a charm.
For example: to combine 2 PDF files into a single PDF simply issue the command
pdftk front.pdf back.pdf output combined.pdf
Exerpt from the readme file:
If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. Pdftk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents. Use it to:
* Merge PDF Documents
* Split PDF Pages into a New Document
* Decrypt Input as Necessary (Password Required)
* Encrypt Output as Desired
* Fill PDF Forms with FDF Data and/or Flatten Forms
* Apply a Background Watermark
* Report PDF Metrics such as Metadata and Bookmarks
* Update PDF Metadata
* Attach Files to PDF Pages or the PDF Document
* Unpack PDF Attachments
* Burst a PDF Document into Single Pages
* Uncompress and Re-Compress Page Streams
* Repair Corrupted PDF (Where Possible)
Download at http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/.
Other really useful PDF tools are:
- HTMLDOC converts HTML files and web pages into indexed HTML, PostScript, and PDF files suitable for on-line viewing and printing.
- Xpdf is an open source viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF) files. (These are also sometimes also called ‘Acrobat’ files, from the name of Adobe’s PDF software.) The Xpdf project also includes a PDF text extractor, PDF-to-PostScript converter, and various other utilities.
- For PHP programming, FPDF is a PHP class which allows to generate PDF files with pure PHP, that is to say without using the PDFlib library.








