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Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files
- 5- 1y agocuriously poppler doesn't mention that anywhere on their website, but the library comes with a similar suite of tools, typically available in linux distributions. i have found them very helpful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppler_(software)#poppler-utils https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poppler_(software)#poppler-uti...
- Hendrikto 1y agoI use these all the time. They are great.
- Gormo 1y agoSame, in conjunction with some of the format conversion tools that come with Ghostscript, and PDFgrep (https://pdfgrep.org/ https://pdfgrep.org/).
- zie 1y agoI just used these tools to parse a few hundred thousand PDF paystubs to get data into our new financial system. 10/10 would use again.
- jopsen 1y agoThere is also: https://pdfcpu.io/ https://pdfcpu.io/ That said, if you're looking for a GUI app to do simple PDF mutations it's often hard to fine a simple solid open source cross platform app. At least I haven't found one :)
- mschild 1y agoIf self hosting is an option, I've found Signature PDF to be quite good. https://github.com/24eme/signaturepdf?tab=readme-ov-file#signature-pdf-libre https://github.com/24eme/signaturepdf?tab=readme-ov-file#sig...
- phyalow 1y agoI had to bash my head against the wall and submit myself to paying for a creative cloud license. At least acrobat just works. Although I wish there was a reasonable alternative.
- emeril 1y agopdf-xchange is worlds better for just about anything in my experience can't believe I waited so long to try it out
- echoangle 1y agoHow about this: https://tools.pdf24.org/en https://tools.pdf24.org/en It allows installation for offline use too.
- vindarel 1y agoI found PDF SAM basic ("split and merge") well done: https://pdfsam.org/en/pdfsam-basic/ https://pdfsam.org/en/pdfsam-basic/. That one is open-source and multi-platform, they have more features in a paying superset project.
- unixhero 1y agoPdfsam and pdfxchange are my gotos
- 5- 1y agoi've tried 'pdfcpu images list' on a random pdf i've had lying around and the tool unexpectedly started downloading some font from unspecified internet location to my local disk. sorry, too spooky even for october. :-)
- roschdal 1y agohttps://github.com/LibrePDF/OpenPDF https://github.com/LibrePDF/OpenPDF
- thb 1y ago[dead]
- blknight 1y agoI’m curious: what good would automating signing a PDF through a utility do? The whole purpose of a signature is that a person signed and agreed to something. That cannot be done automatically.
- withinboredom 1y agoCEOs often need to sign changes to employment terms or options/vesting terms and have hundreds if not thousands of employees. They don't have the time to go through and sign all of those contracts. Its no different than the analog ages where a secretary would go through and stamp all the contracts with the CEOs signature.
- nashashmi 1y agoThose don’t need certified signatures. They just need pdf stamps.
- withinboredom 1y agoIt depends on jurisdiction
- cyanydeez 1y agoPdf stamps have zero security. Signing can be cryptographic.
- lxgr 1y agoJust because that's what many people still do doesn't make it sane.
- echoangle 1y agoWhy wouldn’t a company sign documents they create automatically? This is about a cryptographic signature that lets the user verify authorship, not a visual signature in the PDF, right? So it would still be useful to be able to verify that a bank statement is really from my bank, even if it was generated without human interaction.
- reconnecting 1y agoI though Swiss Army knife for PDF are Didier Stevens PDF tools: https://blog.didierstevens.com/programs/pdf-tools/ https://blog.didierstevens.com/programs/pdf-tools/
- SpacemannSpiff 1y agoPdftk has been been around for many years, and does exactly the same things. Why reinvent the wheel? https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/
- QuantumNomad_ 1y agoIt makes sense to me. They made a PDF library for Python first. Having a PDF library for your preferred language is a good thing. And it’s natural to then build a cli tool on top of the library they already made.
- alanbernstein 1y agoThis was my first thought, but after reading the comments here, I see I had no idea how many other alternatives already existed, so why not add another one.
- moopie 1y agoIt’s not open-source, so practically the question is equivalent to “why reinvent the wheel by creating libreoffice when there’s a perfectly good Microsoft office suite out there”
- mkesper 1y agoThe server component is under GNU GPL: https://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-license/ https://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-license/
- forgotpwd16 1y agoIn case anyone gets confused, PDFTk Server is just the name for the CLI tool, which hasn't been updated in 10y+ (and annoying to compile due to newer GCC versions removing GCJ). The pdftk provided in various distros (incl. Debian, Fedora, Arch, NixOS) is pdftk-java, a 3rd-party pure Java port of the original tool.
- deleted 1y ago
- theothertimcook 1y agoNot the same thing but just want to shoutout https://www.pdfgear.com/ https://www.pdfgear.com/ as one of the only viable alternatives to adobe for intermediate level PDF tinkering. It’s free and available for everything except Linux.
- Chris2048 1y agoI found it suspicious, they formerly sent stuff too their cloud without it being obvious, and the company seems to mod their own subreddit.
- eyegor 1y agoAs nice as it looks, I have a lot of trouble believing the "we have magic money, it's free because that's good for business" logic. PDFgear is free of charge, and we don’t generate income through any hidden means. We Do NOT misuse or sell user data and we Do Not display ads. Here’s how we keep operations running: We’ve secured investment to cover operational costs, including team expenses and technology like the ChatGPT API. We’re also experienced in optimizing technology usage to manage costs more effectively.
- darkwater 1y agoThey also say In the future, most features will remain free, but there will be a fee for some advanced options. Paid options may include AI-driven tools requiring cloud computing and special PDF conversion features. This balanced approach will allow PDFgear to remain widely accessible while meeting users’ evolving needs with advanced solutions.
- hackyhacky 1y ago> It’s free and available for everything except Linux. I was unable to find the link for OpenVMS, Apple II, and DEC Alpha binaries, could you show me where to find it?
- lenerdenator 1y agoIn 1994.
- smartmic 1y agoIn addition to the already mentioned, there is also pdfcpu[0], "a Go PDF processor and CLI" [0]: https://github.com/pdfcpu/pdfcpu https://github.com/pdfcpu/pdfcpu
- HelloUsername 1y agoWhat about https://www.ghostscript.com https://www.ghostscript.com ?
- layer8 1y agoFor low-level work, qpdf can be quite useful: https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf
- ripe 1y agoCame here to say this. Qpdf is my go-to for manipulating pdf files on the command line. Encrypting, decrypting, extracting and merging pages. It's Apache-licensed and written in C++.
- voidmain0001 1y agoHow do you use qpdf for extraction when its README states “qpdf does not render PDFs or perform text extraction, and it does not contain higher-level interfaces for working with page contents.”
- ratrocket 1y agoNot the person you're replying to, but when they said "extraction" I believe they're talking about extracting pages from a PDF (like "splitting" the PDF apart, page-wise), not text. At least that's a thing I've used qpdf for in the past.
- BobaFloutist 1y agoWhich is also what the "extract" button does in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC for Professional Enterprise Customers or whatever they're calling it now, so it's arguably a term of art for PDFs.
- kccqzy 1y agoYou can render the PDF into QDF mode and then it is relatively easy to extract text just by searching for Tj and TJ operators.
- llm_nerd 1y agoThis is totally an aside, but I wonder how long the "Swiss army knife" metaphor will hang on in popular culture. People generally use it to indicate that something does a variety of things, but I'd say many of younger generation have never touched if even seen such a knife in their life, and even among older generations it doesn't have a positive connotation. Like when I hear something is the Swiss army knife of something, my take is that it does a lot of things poorly and there are better specific tools for every need. Like if you need a really terrible knife or bottle opener or screwdriver or saw, a Swiss Army knife has you covered. But it should be a tool of last resort when you have no other options.
- crazygringo 1y agoSwiss Army knives seem to be as popular as ever. What do you mean, doesn't have a positive connotation? They're great hiking, camping, traveling, in backpacks and bags. What's wrong with it as a knife? It's perfectly sharp. Obviously it's not a full-sized chef's knife, but it will cut your apple or twine or packing tape. It's a multitool. It does lots of things. A tool of "last resort" seems to miss the point -- it's not meant to use at home, when you have a full-size screwdriver and bottle opener and corkscrew. It's for traveling with you. And it's great at that. SAK's are iconic. I don't think your take is a common one.
- IAmBroom 1y agoBe serious. If someone in 2025 has a pocket multitool, there's about a 1% chance it is red with a white cross on it.
- crazygringo 1y ago?? Obviously it's not the only game in town ever since Leatherman made the pliers-style tool popular as well. But you can just look up the various brands on Amazon to see that SAK's continue to sell very well, by "x bought in the last month." It's nowhere near 1%, I don't know where you're getting that. Edit: according to [1] Victorinox has the #1 spot in market share in multitools. The share is a bit higher than it is for SOG and Leatherman, though they're both close. [1] https://www.marketreportanalytics.com/reports/swiss-army-knife-multi-tool-181906#summary https://www.marketreportanalytics.com/reports/swiss-army-kni...
- aswegs8 1y agoTIL: there are numerous swiss army knifes for pdf files available already
- VeejayRampay 1y agodue to the nature of PDF, none of the tools mentioned here can do things as simple as detecting tables on pages with high accuracy PDF is absolutely mint for display but it really suffers when parsing is involved
- WillAdams 1y agoYeah, I've been expecting someone to work up a system where: - source file is .md - file is compiled to .pdf _and_ the .md source file is included as an attachment - when working with the file beyond viewing as a .pdf the .md is extracted and used instead of the .pdf The LaTeX folks have a similar system ages ago where the .tex source would be included in a .pdf made from a .tex file for embedding in documents so that it could be sent in say an e-mail and then edited by the recipient --- absolutely awesome for discussing math via e-mail.
- apf6 1y agoThat's a good concept but I don't think Markdown is expressive enough for all the layouts & formatting that people typically want in PDFs. More likely that the source format would be something like HTML or SVG or .docx.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoRestructured text has mostly 1:1 correspondence with Docbook. I use an XSLT transform to convert its XML schema into Docbook and PDF from there via XSL-FO.
- bix6 1y agoIs this an alternative to acrobat?
- JackC 1y agoOpinion from 10 years ago, I suspect still valid: There are a million python libraries and tools to do some overlapping subset of the things you'd want to do with a pdf. There are no doubt another million in other languages. These are each basically bundles of some of the transformations you'd want to make to the same underlying data structure. So, complex pdf scripts often need two or three different libraries to get their thing done, which is wasteful at borh a dev effort and computational level. The ecosystem would be greatly improved if someone made a great (probably rust based) in-memory low level pdf reading and writing data structure. PDF libraries in any language could switch to using that structure and library internally, with the carrot that the switch would result in needing less code, and likely being some combination of faster and safer. And then if they just exposed get_structure_pointer() and set_structure_pointer(), they could all interoperate for free. (Another carrot for joining -- small libraries could usefully add features and be adopted without needing to pick an existing popular library to glom onto.) Not sure what would economically cause this to happen, but it would be great.
- huflungdung 1y ago[dead]
- layer8 1y agoWhen you write a PDF library, there are design trade-offs all the way down, depending on use cases. (Just “in-memory” is already an important design trade-off, because the PDF format is intentionally designed to not require the whole PDF to be loaded into memory at once.) It would also be antithetical to preferring deep modules with minimal interfaces over shallow modules with broad interfaces [0]. Lastly, in managed environments like the JVM, a C-interface library would come with additional complications and overheads. [0] https://dev.to/gosukiwi/software-design-deep-modules-2on9 https://dev.to/gosukiwi/software-design-deep-modules-2on9
- kccqzy 1y agoAh that reminds me of the days when I was viewing a large PDF (some instruction manual that's hundreds of pages long) and the pages appear in the browser as soon as they are downloaded.
- montefischer 1y agoOne feature I would love is the ability to automatically generate the table of contents / “outline” metadata for a pdf. I run across a lot of old book pdfs without that metadata, which makes navigation annoying. Kybook3 has a version of this that doesn’t quite work. Maybe in the age of LLMs, this is now feasible.
- cratermoon 1y agoI use https://github.com/Krasjet/pdf.tocgen https://github.com/Krasjet/pdf.tocgen. It's not quite fully automatic, but it certainly saves a lot of time over doing it completely by hand.
- montefischer 1y agoVery nice! I’ll check it out.
- laserbeam 1y agoThis, is gorgeous! I absolutely hate the PDF ecosystem, and how painful it is to get a reasonably simple tool to just do basic edits to files (adding/removing pages, combining multiple PDFs etc). I particularly hate how hard it is to find good swiss army knives for it, and how you always land on sketchy websites to do simple things to a file. This looks dead simple to use! LOVE IT. The one feature request I have is for adjusting margins (adding/removing fixed amount of space from every page, optionally adding/removing different amounts from odd numbered pages). Target audience: People who want to read PDFs on small ebook readers.
- Western0 1y agoI have similar tool its name TeX
- pgtan 1y agoActually pdftex or luatex, but you are completely right, it can load a pdf file and do a lot of things with it.