PDF Operations

This post is about doing things the open source way, using tools like Ghostscript and ImageMagick.

Conversion

Use Imagemagick’s convert function.

convert file.jpeg file.pdf

Or, you can make a collection of photos in one PDF

 convert [files] outputfile

Merging

When you combine PDFs the outcome can be of low resolution. You can use Ghostscript to improve the results

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=temp.pdf pdf1.pdf pdf2.pdf

Deleting

Use the print function. You can specify ranges when printing like this

1-5,6-8

Update

Concatenating PDFs

I found here a simpler and better solution to the problem described above

pdfconcat -o output.pdf pdf1.pdf pdf2.pdf

Converting an HTML to PDF

You can convert an html file to pdf by printing. However, if the page you’re printing contains links, they would be gone. If you would like to retain the links, I found this tool to be helpful: wkhtmltopdf. To use it, run the command

wkhtmltopdf --page-size A5 html.html pdf.pdf

Use the following if you run into the error described here, use

xvfb-run wkhtmltopdf --page-size A5 html.html pdf.pdf

Extracting Titles

See pdfinfo, a function provided by the Xpdf project.