A Simple Way To Split & Merge Multipage PDF Files With PDF Toolkit!

Sometimes we come across a situation where we need to scissor or stitch the pdf document. There are several tools to do this job. The simplest and easiest way is to use PDF Toolkit.

This tutorial is for Geeks. If you are not one, go get GUI App for windows  or if you just want to split one single file, use online tools like Split PDF.

I am going to split and stitch several pdf documents using pdftk & Ubuntu 12.04.

Lets first install it

sudo apt-get install pdftk

Now you are armed with tool kit, lets have some fun with it.

Splitting PDF:

Lets say you want to split the entire pdf into single pages, you can do that by

pdftk myFile.pdf burst

If you want you can split only a specific page by using

pdftk myFile.pdf cat 21 output page_21.pdf

You can also split specific set of pages by using

pdftk myFile.pdf cat  21-end output 21_to_last.pdf

Merging PDF:

Now we have scissored a lot of pages. Lets go ahead and stitch a few of them.
Lets stitch the pdf's we have created in the previous steps.

pdftk page_21.pdf 21_to_end.pdf cat output stitched.pdf

This will stitch the two pdf's we created above.

If you have a huge list of single age pdf's in a folder and if you want to stitch them together, change the current working directory to the required directory and use this

pdftk *.pdf cat output newFile.pdf

This will stitch all the pdf in the current directory to a single pdf.

These are few simple things to do with pdftk, if you want to dig deep into this visit pdftk and explore it