pdftk – command line magic for PDFs

Sorry it’s been so long since I posted. Things have been busy this summer with family reunions, family visiting, on-call of course, and all the normal fun of life.

So here’s at least a little fun to share. I’m sure you occasionally want to chop up a PDF file into tiny bits and then re-assemble it. For instance if you’re teaching a class and you want to give students the chapter they’re working on and the glossary at the back.

Enter pdftk onto the scene. It allegedly runs on *nix, Windows and Mac. I can only testify for the Windows portion of it. I know, you’re saying, “BUT THIS IS A UNIX BLOG.” Well, I decided that something was better than nothing.

So anyhow, it’s free, go download it here and try it out. Like many command line commands it’s a bit enigmatic, but try the –help flag and you’ll be jamming in no time.