PDF Documents Manipulation Software options
Norman Gray
norman.gray at glasgow.ac.uk
Wed Apr 22 22:36:02 UTC 2020
Greetings.
On 22 Apr 2020, at 23:14, Jordan wrote:
> Any suggestions that you use or have heard that works with FreeBSD?
I have gathered a few links here, with (it sounds) similar goals in
mind, but each time round this loop I've managed to solve my immediate
problems without investigating what I've found too rigorously. Also,
when doing this I've been primarily working on macOS. Bearing all that
in mind, however, my notes are below.
_Just_ before sending this message, Polytropon's message appeared
on-list. They queried your statement that
> I work
> with hundreds of PDFs each day so I cannot work within a CLI to
> manipulate the pages.
I think that, in drafting my answer, I'd automatically misread what you
said as 'so I cannot work _without_ a CLI to manipulate the images'.
Echoing Polytropon, what tools are useful of course depends on just what
you need to do, but whilst acknowledging that I may be answering a
question you didn't ask, my notes below focus on programmatic
manipulation of PDFs.
Good luck,
Norman
There is a Python library called
[pikepdf](https://github.com/pikepdf/pikepdf). It looks promising, but
I had a little trouble building it -- I gave up before trying very hard,
though. This tools compares itself (favourably, of course) to PyPDF2,
which seems to be the conventional suggestion.
However it seems to install happily enough as a python package (via
venv/pip). Then:
from pikepdf import Pdf
import glob
pdf = Pdf.new()
for file in glob.glob('part?.pdf'):
src = Pdf.open(file)
pdf.pages.extend(src.pages)
pdf.save('allparts.pdf')
[pdftk](https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-server/) is a ‘toolkit’
(not sure just what this means in this context), but it includes a
[command-line
interface](https://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-cli-examples/) which
includes some useful examples such as
% pdftk a.pdf b.pdf cat output ab.pdf
This also looks a bit tricky to build from scratch.
--
Norman Gray : http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/it/
Research IT Coordinator : School of Physics and Astronomy
// My current template week for IT tasks is: Monday, Tuesday, and Friday
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