Title: Manipulate PDF files easily with pdftk
       Author: Solène
       Date: 19 August 2023
       Tags: productivity
       Description: In this article, you will learn how to use pdftk to
       rotate, extract or merge PDF pages
       
       # Introduction
       
       I often need to work with PDF, sometimes I need to extract a single
       page, or add a page, too often I need to rotate pages.
       
       Fortunately, there is a pretty awesome tool to do all of these tasks,
       it's called PDFtk.
       
 (HTM) pdftkofficial project website
       
       # Operations
       
       Pdftk command line isn't the most obvious out there, but it's not that
       hard.
       
       ## Extracting a page
       
       Extracting a page requires the `cat` sub command, and we need to give a
       page number or a range of pages.
       
       For instance, extracting the pages 11, and from 16 to 18 from the file
       my_pdf.pdf to a new file export.pdf can be done with the following
       command:
       
       ```
       pdftk my_pdf.pdf cat 11 16-18 output export.pdf
       ```
       
       ## Merging PDF into a single PDF
       
       Merging multiple PDFs into a single PDF also uses the sub command
       `cat`.  In the following example, you will concatenate the PDF
       first.pdf and second.pdf into a merged.pdf result:
       
       ```
       pdftk first.pdf second.pdf cat output merged.pdf
       ```
       
       Note that they are concatenated in their order in the command line.
       
       ## Rotating PDF
       
       Pdftk comes with a very powerful way to rotate PDFs pages.  You can
       specify pages or ranges of pages to rotate, the whole document, or only
       odd/even pages etc...
       
       If you want to rotate all the pages of a PDF clockwise (east), we need
       to specify a range `1-end`, which means first to last page:
       
       ```
       pdftk input.pdf rotate 1-endeast output rotated.pdf
       ```
       
       If you want to select even or odd pages, you can add the keyword `even`
       or `odd` between the range and the rotation direction: `1-10oddwest` or
       `2-8eveneast` are valid rotations.
       
       ## Reversing the page ordering
       
       If you want to reverse how pages are in your PDF, we can use the
       special range `end-1` which will go through pages from the last to the
       first one, with the sub command `cat` this will only recreate a new
       PDF:
       
       ```
       pdftk input.pdf cat end-1 output reversed.pdf
       ```
       
       # Conclusion
       
       Pdftk have some other commands, most people will need to extract /
       merge / rotate pages, but take a look at the documentation to learn
       about all pdftk features.
       
       PDF are usually a pain to work with, but pdftk make it very fast and
       easy to apply transformation on them.  What a great tool :-)