PDFtk Cheat Sheet

· Cheat Sheets

PDFtk is an open-source command-line tool for manipulating PDF documents, allowing users to merge, split, rotate, and encrypt PDFs, among other functions.

Concatenate

pdftk in1.pdf in2.pdf in3.pdf cat output out_123.pdf
pdftk *.pdf cat output out.pdf
pdftk A=in1.pdf B=in2.pdf cat A B output out_12.pdf

Interleave

pdftk A=odd.pdf B=even.pdf shuffle A B output collated.pdf

Remove / Split

pdftk in.pdf cat 1-12 14-end output out.pdf
pdftk foo-bar.pdf cat 1-12 output foo.pdf
pdftk foo-bar.pdf cat 13-end output bar.pdf
pdftk foobar.pdf burst output foobar-%d.pdf

Split Even/Odd

pdftk collated.pdf cat 1-endeven output even.pdf
pdftk collated.pdf cat 1-endodd output odd.pdf

Rotate

pdftk in.pdf cat 1-endeast output out.pdf

Extract

pdftk in.pdf cat 20 output out.pdf

Edit Table of Contents

pdftk in.pdf dump_data > info.out
pdftk in.pdf update_info info.out output out.pdf

Edit info.out

...
NumberOfPages: 36
BookmarkBegin
BookmarkTitle: 01. Title
BookmarkLevel: 1
BookmarkPageNumber: 2
BookmarkBegin
BookmarkTitle: 02. Title
BookmarkLevel: 1
BookmarkPageNumber: 3
...

References