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red_trumpet
Asked: 2017-09-07 03:47:58 +0800 CST

Rearrange PDF pages using the command-line

  • 772

I want to rearrange the pages in a PDF file. But because I have to rearrange many pages, and the new arrangement has a specific pattern, I would like to do so with a script. Is there a simple program which allows to rearrange the pages in a PDF?

Alternatively I could also extract all pages and merge them together in the order I want. What progams are available to do this?

command-line

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    pdftk is the one you're searching for. E.g. if you want to reverse the page order of i.pdf, do

    pdftk i.pdf cat end-1 output o.pdf

    Other examples showing pdftk's potential:

    pdftk i.pdf cat 4-1 6 8-end output o.pdf # use ranges
pdftk i.pdf cat 1-6even output o.pdf     # print only even pages in the range
pdftk i.pdf cat 1-10 ~5-7 output o.pdf   # exclude pages in the range
pdftk i.pdf burst                        # extract to single-page pdf files

    Read man pdftk for more information.

    To install pdftk on 18.04 see: How can I install pdftk in Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic?

    If you after all search for a GUI solution have a look at pdftk's GUI pdfchain or pdfmod.

    • 26

  2. You can also try pdfjam pdfnup (based on LaTeX pdf-pages)

    Example:

    pdfjam i.pdf '{},2,1-5'         -o o.pdf
pdfjam f1.pdf f2.pdf f3.pdf 1-3 -o o.pdf   ## first 3 pages from f1,f2,f3
    • {} inserts an empty page
    • many options available (ex: scale, offset, trim, frame, nup) -- see pdfjam man
    • 8

  3. You can use qpdf which comes with ubuntu. This following command for example puts the pages in reverse order.

    qpdf --empty --pages infile.pdf z-1 -- outfile.pdf

    You can find more information and other examples here on pages 10 and 11.

    • 6

  4. qpdf works like a charm (tested under cygwin, don't say it), preserving the links within the pdf required me to not use the --empty option and to replace it with the input filename:

    qpdf input.pdf --pages input.pdf 1,4,5,7-r8,2,3,r7-z -- output.qpdf.pdf

    (rN to select a page indexed from end, z for last page)

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