DEV Community

Marcin Piczkowski
Marcin Piczkowski

Posted on • Updated on

Cutting and merging PDF files from the command line

#pdf #bash #linux


Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

I wanted to show you a few simple commands which saved me a lot of time while tidying up some PDF files.
You can cut them into pages, merge or split based on the page range. Here it is:

  • cut off the first page from input.pdf file and save result as output.pdf 
pdftk input.pdf cat 2-end output output.pdf
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode
  • merge file1.pdf and file2.pdf into single output.pdf 
gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-sOutputFile=output.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode
  • split input.pdf into single-page pdf files starting from 2-nd and ending on 15-th page. It will create files: output_2.pdf, output_3.pdf, output_4.pdf and so on.. up to output_15.pdf 
pdfseparate -f 2 -l 15 input.pdf out_%d.pdf
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode
  • convert image to pdf file

First, install img2pdf:

sudo apt-get install img2pdf
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Then convert image.jpg to output.pdf:

img2pdf image.jpg -o output.pdf
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode
  • convert multiple images to pdf file

You can do it with another very useful tool - ImageMagic.

You can install it like that:

sudo apt update 
sudo apt-get install build-essential
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Then let's say we want to create a pdf file from image1.jpg, image2.jpg and image3.bmp :

convert image1.jpg image2.png image3.bmp -quality 100 output.pdf
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

You may get error message like:

convert-im6.q16: no images defined `output.pdf' @ error/convert.c/ConvertImageCommand/3258.
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

This means ImageMagic protects you from processing pdf files. To allow it you need to have root privilege and edit /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml and comment out this line

 <!--policy domain="coder" rights="none" pattern="PDF" --/>
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Oldest comments (1)

Collapse
 
smithharber profile image
smithharber •

CubexSoft PDF Split Tool in Adobe PDF on any Windows OS edition? Try out the best and most trusted PDF Split Tool on your any Windows machine and follow its simple working steps for bulk PDF Split in Adobe PDF within a single time process. For getting comprehensive material of this program you can use the free trial edition for PDF Split in Adobe PDF without any cost. Also, users can combine PDF in Adobe Reader along with all information. For bulk combine PDF in Adobe Reader, users can download the tool on all Windows OS platform.
*Read More: *PDF Merge Tool

Read next

code-hunter profile image

Bash libraries as a repo for your most awesome code

Code Hunter -

davidmm1707 profile image

Security auditing your Linux OS with Lynis

David MM👨🏻‍💻 -

jamii profile image

Backup and Restore Postgres Database from local to remote.

Shafayat Jamil -

julio_reyes11 profile image

Cómo instalar WSL2 en Windows 11

Julio Reyes -