Title: Manipulate PDF files easily with pdftk

	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 :-)