Sunday, May 20, 2018

Split PDF document from command line in Linux?

I would like to extract page ranges from a PDF document into a new PDF document using the command line in Linux. Note that:






$ pdftk input.pdf cat 1 verbose output output.pdf
Error: Failed to open PDF file:
input.pdf
Errors encountered. No output created.
Done. Input errors, so no output created.



Turns out that "You (should) know that Pdftk is nothing more than a very old version of
iText.... The keywords in the above statement are "VERY OLD".
" (from pdftk can't open pdf file)









$ java -classpath /path/to/Multivalent20091027.jar tool.pdf.Split -page 1 input.pdf
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: tool/pdf/Split
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: tool.pdf.Split
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:202)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:306)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:247)
Could not find the main class: tool.pdf.Split. Program will exit.



Turns out, this is a bit of a tricky software: even if its on SourceForge, and says that "Practical Thought generously provides these tools for free use on the command line" here - however, here then it says: "The browser is open source. The document tools are a free bonus and not open source." ... which finally clarifies the comment from conversion - Gluing (Imposition) PDF documents - Stack Overflow:




All releases of Multivalent linked from the official sourceforge site are missing the tools package.




(edit: there seems to be an old Multivalent version with the tools included, see the SO link; but as it looks somewhat like abandonware, I'd rather not use it)







  • Finally, I'd like to avoid tools that are essentially front-ends for Latex like PDFjam



 



So, are there any options for such a pdf-splitting command line tool under Linux?

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