A freeware graphical tool and a paid version of the original PDFtk also exists
for Windows, but this article only describes its command-line version
its editor calls PDFtk server. More precisely, the examples below
use the pdftk port into java usually available on GNU/Linux
distributions as the package pdftk-java.
Basic syntax
The basic syntax for using the command is the following:
pdftk <input files> <operation> [<operation arguments>] [output <output file>]
<input files>is the list of the input files, but can also be-to read the input from the standard input, orPROMPTto havepdftkprompt the user for the name(s) of the input file(s);<operation arguments>is optional, as some operations do not require arguments;output <output file>is optional with some actions, but mandatory with others.<output files>is usually the name the output file. It can also be a printf-style format string to name the files resulting from the split of a document with theburstoperation. Or it can be-to print the result to the standard output, orPROMPTto to havepdftkprompt the user for the name of the output file.
Extract pages
The extraction of a page is possible through the cat operation.
To extract the page 3 of the document input.pdf and write it to the document
page3.pdf use the following command:
Several pages can also be extracted at once. They will be concatenated into the
output document in the specified order. This example will extract the pages 2,
3, 4 and the page 6 from input.pdf into result.pdf :
Here are a few other examples of page ranges to illustrate the possibilities:
- 1-21 : pages 1 to 21 (included);
- 4-10 5-7 8 : pages 4 to 10, 5 to 7 and page 8;
- end-2 : pages extracted in reverse order from the last page to the second page;
- end-2odd : same as above, but only the odd pages are extracted;
- 1-4 5 5 4 : pages 1 to 4, then repeat page 5 twice, and extract page 4 again;
- r1: the last page of the input document (same as end);
- r3-r5: pages 3 to 5 counted from the end of the input document.
Concatenate several full documents
To concatenate all the pages of the two documents beginning.pdf and
ending.pdf into the document result.pdf, run:
Concatenate specific pages from different documents
You can choose specific page(s) from the input documents and concatenate them. In this case, name the input files with handles (that are freely chosen names) to next specify the pages to extract from each file in the range of pages.
For example, to use pages 1, 2, 3 and 6 from a document named input1.pdf, the
page 2 from input2.pdf, all pages starting from page 4 from input3.pdf, and
write all these pages to a document named result.pdf, you would run:
A similar example would be to replace the page 4 of the document input1.pdf
by the next-to-last page from input2.pdf (r2 is the second page from the
end of the document):
Note that you can also use the keywords even or odd, alone or as a suffix
of a page range to respectively select even or odd pages from that range (see
the examples of page ranges above).
Split all the pages of a document into different files
Use the action burst to split each page of a document into a specific file
that will be named by default pg_0001.pdf, pg_0002.pdf, etc.:
The name of the destination files can be chosen by providing the keyword
output and a printf-styled format string to name the files. If you want the
page files to be named page_01.pdf, page_02.pdf, etc., you can use:
The default format used for page filenames is pg_%04d.pdf.
Collate pages from documents
If you scanned the odd pages of a document separately from the even pages (for
example using a scan feeder that only scans one side of a sheet), the action
shuffle can be used to easily reassemble them into a new document.
As the pdftk(1) manual page puts it, shuffle “works like the cat operation
except that it takes one page at a time from each page range to assemble the
output PDF”.
To collate all the pages of the input documents, you do not need to specify a range, and you could simply write:
But, if odd.pdf was scanned in reverse order, you can simply specify a
reverse range like this:
In this case, shuffle will produce the document output.pdf by writing, in
order:
- the last page of
odd.pdf; - then the first page of
even.pdf; - then the next-to-last page of
odd.pdf; - then the second page of
even.pdf; - etc.
If you want to test this functionality, remember you can extract the odd pages
or the even pages from a document using cat:
Rotate the pages of a document
To rotate pages of a document, use rotate and specify the list of pages to
rotate, like you would give a list of pages to concatenate with cat, but do
not specify the pages you do not want to rotate.
Note that the order of the pages in the rotation command does not matter, it will not change the order of the pages in the output.
A rotate command would therefore follow this kind of syntax:
To specify the type of rotation in an absolute way, use the following keywords. The original top of the page will be rotated to point to that many degrees to the right:
north: 0°;east: 90°;south: 180°;west: 270°;
The following keywords allow to specify a rotation relative to a page's rotation:
left: -90°;right: +90°;down: +180°.
For example, to orientate the top of all the pages of the document input.pdf
90° to the right, use:
To rotate 90° to the left the pages 2 and 4 of the document input.pdf
(leaving other pages untouched, and the original order of the pages unchanged),
you could use:
Combine rotation and concatenation
The rotate operation can be used in combination with cat simply by using a
rotation keyword in the page range to extract.
For example, after using the following command, the resulting document
result.pdf would:
- start with the pages 1 and 2 untouched from
input1.pdf; - then include all the pages from
input2.pdf, all rotated 90° to the right; - and finally include the pages 5 and all the following to the end of
input1.pdf: