(Reproduced from The Furtive Penguin )
Of the many tools which can be used to create and manipulate PDF files on a Linux system pdftk is probably the most powerful and useful. It can:-
Merge PDF Documents
Split PDF Pages into a New Document
Rotate PDF Pages or Documents
Decrypt Input as Necessary (Password Required)
Encrypt Output as Desired
Fill PDF Forms with FDF Data or XFDF Data and/or Flatten Forms
Apply a Background Watermark or a Foreground Stamp
Report on PDF Metrics such as Metadata, Bookmarks, and Page Labels
Update PDF Metadata
Attach Files to PDF Pages or the PDF Document
Unpack PDF Attachments
Burst a PDF Document int
o Single Pages
Uncompress and Re-Compress Page Streams
Repair Corrupted PDF (Where Possible)
This is quite an impressive feature set but of course, as supplied, it is a command line tool. A GUI frontend is available for it but you will need to install the Lazarus Pascal compiler before it will run. PDFTK-GUI is available here and the Lazarus compiler together with instructions for installing on Ububtu can be found here. This is quite an overhead just to run one GUI front-end so I am offering an alternative script. The script allows you to access much of the functionality of pdftk without mastering the command line syntax. Just for good measure pdftotext is included as well.
In order to use the script you will need to install the following packages:-pdftk, poppler-utils (or xpdf-utils).Both packages are available from the Debian/Ububtu repositories. Once installed I suggest that you create a PDF directory in your home folder and store both the script and your collection of PDF's there.This script could be easily adapted for use with 'Dialog'. Anyone wishing to do so could usefully consult the previous two articles in this series. There are examples and plenty of code to cannibalize in Parts 1 and 2.
The obligatory screenshots are included below:-
The PDFManager Script (Available here)
PDFTK-GUI
Whichever you decide to install...have fun!
No comments:
Post a Comment