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 :-)