Poppler Utilities for Manipulating PDF

Published 2022-12-31 | Go Back

I’ve just realized that Poppler has command line utilities and they are perfect for manipulating PDF files.

I was trying to extract a few pages from various PDF documents and combine them into a single file for easier double-sided printing. I had used PDFtk before, so I typed in pdf hoping that the shell autocompletion can remind me what the executable is. Several candidates popped out without anything that looked like PDFtk. However, I noticed one named pdfseparate. Looking at its help information, apparently, it’s part of the Poppler library. I’ve always considered Poppler as a PDF generation library due to my usage of PDFLaTex, but now I see that it has command line utilities as well. It’s a pleasant surprise that the utilities are very easy to use.

For example, I used the following command to extract the second page from a PDF document. Note that -f and -l indicate first and last pages to extract, inclusively.

pdfseparate -f 2 -l 2 input.pdf output.pdf

Similarly, I used the following command to combine the extracted pages into a single PDF file:

pdfunite input1.pdf input2.pdf input3.pdf output.pdf

Later, I found a wiki page for brief descriptions on all the Poppler utilities.

I wish that I had known this earlier, but better late than never.