Merge, split, rotate, and repair PDF Files

Posted on September 10, 2009 at 5:30 am

Previously, I wrote about a nifty little tool called PDFHammer that lets you merge and edit PDF files online. Though it works well, it’s still convenient to have this ability without an Internet connection.

pdftk is a free toolkit that lets you manipulate PDF files in many different ways. The tool is run using commands entered into the command prompt, which may scare some people, but it’s not all that bad.

Here are some of the things you can do with the PDF toolkit:

Merge multiple PDF documents into one
Split a PDF file into multiple new documents
Rotate pages inside a PDF
Decrypt and encrypt input and output as desired
Fill in PDF forms with FDF or XFDF data
Apply a watermark to your PDF files or a foreground stamp
Update PDF metadata
Attach files to a PDF document
Repair corrupted PDF documents

Once you download and unzip the file, you’ll notice it’s just a single EXE file. The best thing to do is to copy this file into the C:\Windows\System32 folder so that you can run it without having to change into the directory where the file is stored.

Then open a command prompt by going to Start, Run and typing in CMD. In the window, go ahead and type in pdftk –h.

The help is really useful because it gives you examples for each command that it supports. So if you want to merge two PDF files, use this command:

pdftk 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf cat output 123.pdf

If you want to take a PDF document and split out all the pages so that each one is a separate PDF document, you can use the Burst command:

pdftk mydoc.pdf burst

You can also use the program to attach files to the PDF document, which is pretty interesting. If there are certain spreadsheets or Word documents that are associated with the PDF, you can use the attach command add them:

pdftk in.pdf attach_files table1.html table2.html output out.pdf

Note that the person you are sending the files to also has to use this tool to un-attach the files and view them. Even so, it’s a nifty way to spend a kind of “package” of files to someone for review, etc.

Overall, the toolset has a lot of features and is really useful, especially if you want to write some kind of script to merge, split, or rotate PDF documents and then schedule the script to run using the Scheduled Task wizard. Enjoy! [via NirmalTV]

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