Title: Manipulate PDF files easily with pdftk
Author: Solène
Date: 19 August 2023
Tags: productivity
Description: In this article, you will learn how to use pdftk to
rotate, extract or merge PDF pages

# Introduction

I often need to work with PDF, sometimes I need to extract a single
page, or add a page, too often I need to rotate pages.

Fortunately, there is a pretty awesome tool to do all of these tasks,
it's called PDFtk.

pdftkofficial project website

# Operations

Pdftk command line isn't the most obvious out there, but it's not that
hard.

## Extracting a page

Extracting a page requires the `cat` sub command, and we need to give a
page number or a range of pages.

For instance, extracting the pages 11, and from 16 to 18 from the file
my_pdf.pdf to a new file export.pdf can be done with the following
command:

```
pdftk my_pdf.pdf cat 11 16-18 output export.pdf
```

## Merging PDF into a single PDF

Merging multiple PDFs into a single PDF also uses the sub command
`cat`.  In the following example, you will concatenate the PDF
first.pdf and second.pdf into a merged.pdf result:

```
pdftk first.pdf second.pdf cat output merged.pdf
```

Note that they are concatenated in their order in the command line.

## Rotating PDF

Pdftk comes with a very powerful way to rotate PDFs pages.  You can
specify pages or ranges of pages to rotate, the whole document, or only
odd/even pages etc...

If you want to rotate all the pages of a PDF clockwise (east), we need
to specify a range `1-end`, which means first to last page:

```
pdftk input.pdf rotate 1-endeast output rotated.pdf
```

If you want to select even or odd pages, you can add the keyword `even`
or `odd` between the range and the rotation direction: `1-10oddwest` or
`2-8eveneast` are valid rotations.

## Reversing the page ordering

If you want to reverse how pages are in your PDF, we can use the
special range `end-1` which will go through pages from the last to the
first one, with the sub command `cat` this will only recreate a new
PDF:

```
pdftk input.pdf cat end-1 output reversed.pdf
```

# Conclusion

Pdftk have some other commands, most people will need to extract /
merge / rotate pages, but take a look at the documentation to learn
about all pdftk features.

PDF are usually a pain to work with, but pdftk make it very fast and
easy to apply transformation on them.  What a great tool :-)