Get PDFTk Into (or From) A Repo

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I don’t remember where, but I read a discussion about a library used in pdftk that was a problem in RHEL/CentOS 7. It seems that qpdf does many, if not more of the same things and is part of CentOS, no additional repo required. Here is the text from the description of the qpdf repo:

QPDF is a command-line program that does structural, content-preserving transformations on PDF files. It could have been called something like pdf-to-pdf. It includes support for merging and splitting PDFs and to manipulate the list of pages in a PDF file. It is not a PDF viewer or a program capable of converting PDF into other formats.

Naturally the syntax is different, but the times that I’ve needed it, qdf has been fine.

9 thoughts on - Get PDFTk Into (or From) A Repo

  • It’s worth mentioning that this is a really nice utility for manipulating PDFs, taking them apart, rearranging them, putting pages together, and a whole lot more. I’ve used it hundreds of times.
    Probably anyone who has to work with PDFs would have need of it.

  • Le 12/05/2017 à 02:46, ken a écrit :

    In CentOS 7, poppler-utils RPM has pdfdetach and pdfunite utilities which allow to manipulate pages in a pdf.

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  • I don’t remember where, but I read a discussion about a library used in pdftk that was a problem in RHEL/CentOS 7. It seems that qpdf does many, if not more of the same things and is part of CentOS, no additional repo required. Here is the text from the description of the qpdf repo:

    QPDF is a command-line program that does structural, content-preserving transformations on PDF files. It could have been called something like pdf-to-pdf. It includes support for merging and splitting PDFs and to manipulate the list of pages in a PDF file. It is not a PDF viewer or a program capable of converting PDF into other formats.

    Naturally the syntax is different, but the times that I’ve needed it, qdf has been fine.

    Barry

  • That’s great to know. Linux should have multiple ways to do one and the same thing. In a free world we shouldn’t be dependent on just one solution. Indeed, pdfedit is another app for manipulating PDFs. Having skimmed through the docs on these and others mentioned in this thread, none of them can, in addition, rotate selected pages (i.e., turn them by
    90, 180, or 270 degrees), plus select pages by the keywords “odd” and
    “even”. The GIMP can be used to rotate PDFs, but it’s a PITA to do it there and it can’t natively select and then so manipulate multiple PDF
    pages programmatically.

    Rather than my repeated replying to this thread, docs on pdftk can be found at https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/.

  • I have used pdftk for years and it met most of my needs – however when I
    moved to CentOS 7 as my work station it was not available. Looking at their web site they only mention CentOS 5 & 6 thus indicating that their support for linux has stalled or been removed and no development is happening. This has been the case for at least two years. Hence I have moved to the other tools that have been mentioned previously in this thread.