Free and open source PDF tools

Recently I needed a tool to modify PDF files and afterwards merge these files into one file. I ended up using the following tools:

Inkscape

Inkscape is a free and open source vector graphics editor that can be used - among lots of other functions - to modify a single PDF page (e.g. add text).

AccessPDF - Pdftk the PDF Toolkit.

Pdftk is a free and open source easy to use command line tool for:

* Merge PDF Documents
* Split PDF Pages into a New Document
* Decrypt Input as Necessary (Password Required)
* Encrypt Output as Desired
* Fill PDF Forms with FDF Data and/or Flatten Forms
* Apply a Background Watermark
* Report on PDF Metrics such as Metadata, Bookmarks, and Page Labels
* Update PDF Metadata
* Attach Files to PDF Pages or the PDF Document
* Unpack PDF Attachments
* Burst a PDF Document into Single Pages
* Uncompress and Re-Compress Page Streams
* Repair Corrupted PDF (Where Possible)

e.g. the following example Merges Three PDFs into a New Document

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

There are other free and open source PDF tools available, that could be used for PDF manipulations such as:
  • PDFedit --> but these crashed in my Kubuntu installation when I tried to merge pdf-files
  • OpenOffice 3.0 --> The Beta looks promising, but only OpenOffice 2.4 is currently available in the Ubuntu repositories.
  • Okular --> looks handy to add annotations (notes) but seem to not support adding normal text
Further tools can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Automatically mount a ntfs hard disk at login in Ubuntu 8.04

Ubuntu 8.04 automatically detects connected hard drives (such as a second drive with an NTFS partition). NTFS hard drives are not mounted automatically by default in Ubuntu 8.04. Instead they need to be mounted manually e.g. via clicking onto them in Nautilus. Sometimes it is desirable that such a NTFS drive will be automatically mounted at login (e.g. when you want to run a script that uses these drives at startup). This can be done via: 1) Make a mounting point for that drive sudo mkdir /media/Backup_HD Note: Replace "Backup_HD" with whatever name you like. 2) Edit /etc/fstab: sudo gedit /etc/fstab 3) Add the following text in fstab: /dev/sdb1 /media/Backup_HD ntfs defaults,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 1 Note: Replace "/media/Backup_HD" with the name you choose in the 1st step. Furthermore, replace "/dev/sdb1" with the actual value for the hard disk you want to mount automatically. Note: If you don't know what value you should use instead of "/dev/sdb1&
Read more

How to make screenshots and screencasts easily in Mac OS X?

In Mac OS X you can take a screenshot of the complete screen by pressing Command-Shift-3 and a selection of the screen by pressing Command-Shift-4. This is usually sufficient enough, but if you try to use this key combination to capture a screenshot of a movie running in the Mac OS X DVD Player you will be surprised to find out that this doesn't work. The same is true for the built in Grab Application. If you still want to do capture a picture from a DVD you could use the screen-capture shell utility in the Terminal application - as described in several webpages. But if you would like something more convenient you could use an application such as Jing ( http://www.techsmith.com/jing/ ). It allows you not only to take a picture even from a movie running in the DVD Player but also to make a short videos of the your screen and provides several options to edit, save and share this pictures and videos afterwards. There is a Free version available as well as a Pro version with more f
Read more

Use Western Digital WDH1NC10000E My Book World Edition 1TB NAS network drive as backup destination for time machine on Mac OS X 10.5

Image
As my 500GB Time Capsule has reached the limits (my Macbook and the iMac of my wife used it as backup destination for Time Machine ), I decided to buy another backup drive and settled with the Western Digital WDH1NC10000E My Book World Edition 1TB NAS external drive. The main advantage (besides the price: I bought it fo r EUR 146,95 (incl. VAT and free transportation) for me was that I could easily connect it to a free Ethernet port of my Time Capsule - at least that was what I did expected. But after I connected the My Book to my network as discribed in the My Book manual, I had to discover that although it was available in the finder and I could manually copy files to it, it wasn't available in Time Machine as a back up destination. Furtunately obvioulsly others experienced this problem before and after some googling I came to the solution described in the post "Time Machine backups on network shares in Leopard" from Florian Kruse. Following the steps described the
Read more