Editing PDFs is always a headache. I don’t most of the time, but I was always scrambling to find a GUI tool when I need to. As I moved from Windows to Linux, my options became even more limited. For a long time, I was using free online PDF editors. It was enough, until I wanted to edit a PDF with sensitive private information. That forced me to explore command line tools. I had found a few since then. Here is a little cheatsheet to share.
Image to pdf
Installation
pip3 install img2pdf
# or
sudo apt install img2pdf
Example
img2pdf --pagesize A4 -o enbridge_bill.pdf IMG_20220201_110317~2.jpg IMG_20220201_110347~2.jpg IMG_20220201_110454~2.jpg IMG_20220201_110522~2.jpg
pagesize options:
support A<num> sizing and Letter
it’s case sensitive
pdftk
Installation
sudo apt install pdftk
Change pdf bookmarks
You can create a new pdf file with the new metadata, e.g. bookmark. This is particularly useful for me because Okular’s bookmark system stores the user added bookmark somewhere else entirely.
Get existing pdf metadata
pdftk <pdf_path> dump_data
# could save stdout to file
pdftk target-pdf.pdf dump_data >> ./metadata
update the metadata file
Code snippet for bookmarks
NumberOfPages: 161
# what goes before
BookmarkBegin
BookmarkTitle: <title>
BookmarkLevel: 2
BookmarkPageNumber: <page>
# what goes after
PageMediaBegin
Create new pdf with new metadata
pdftk <original_pdf> update_info <new_metadata> output <new_pdf>
Merge PDFs
pdftk A=<file path> B=<file path> ... cat <list of files aliases> output <output file path>
pdftk A=file1.pdf B=file2.pdf cat A B output out.pdf
Honorable Mention
pdftools (python) . It support merge, add, insert, zip, …