Whenever I need to get some PDF processing or analysis done and I’m not sure what tool to use, these are usually my starting points. Each of these are capable of a wide range of tasks (including some I won’t explicitly address here), and they can be seen as “Swiss army-knives” of PDF processing.

PDF multi-toolsīefore diving into any specific tasks, let’s start with some general-purpose PDF tools and toolkits.

They all work under Linux (which is the main OS I’m using these days), but most of them are available for other platforms (including Windows) as well. using additional options or alternative output formats), and they should probably best seen as (hopefully useful) starting points for the reader’s own explorations.Īll of the tools presented here are published as open-source, and most of them have a command-line interface. Also, many of the example commands in this post can be further refined to particular needs (e.g. So there’s probably a fair amount of selection bias here, and I don’t want to make any claims of presenting the “best” way to do any of these tasks here. Some of these tasks could be done using other tools (including ones that are not mentioned here), and in some cases these other tools may well be better choices. It was guided to a great degree by the PDF-related issues I’ve encountered myself in my day to day work.

View, search and extract low-level PDF objectsĮven though this post covers a lot of ground, the selection of tasks and tools presented here is by no means meant to be exhaustive.

File size reduction of PDF with hi-res graphics.

Inspection of embedded image information.

Document information and metadata extraction.

Starting with a brief overview of some general-purpose PDF toolkits, I then move on to a discussion of the following specific tasks:

It is largely based on a multitude of scattered lists, cheat-sheets and working notes that I made earlier. This post is an attempt to (finally) bring together my go-to PDF analysis and processing tools and commands for a variety of common tasks in one single place. Over the years, I’ve been using a variety of open-source software tools for solving all sorts of issues with PDF documents.

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