Rearrange PDF pages using the command-line

Question

I want to rearrange the pages in a PDF file. But because I have to rearrange many pages, and the new arrangement has a specific pattern, I would like to do so with a script. Is there a simple program which allows to rearrange the pages in a PDF?

Alternatively I could also extract all pages and merge them together in the order I want. What progams are available to do this?

Answer 1

pdftk is the one you're searching for. E.g. if you want to reverse the page order of i.pdf, do

pdftk i.pdf cat end-1 output o.pdf

Other examples showing pdftk's potential:

pdftk i.pdf cat 4-1 6 8-end output o.pdf # use ranges
pdftk i.pdf cat 1-6even output o.pdf     # print only even pages in the range
pdftk i.pdf cat 1-10 ~5-7 output o.pdf   # exclude pages in the range
pdftk i.pdf burst                        # extract to single-page pdf files

Read man pdftk for more information.

To install pdftk on 18.04 see: How can I install pdftk in Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic?

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If you after all search for a GUI solution have a look at pdftk's GUI pdfchain or pdfmod.

Answer 2

You can also try pdfjam pdfnup (based on LaTeX pdf-pages)

Example:

pdfjam i.pdf '{},2,1-5'         -o o.pdf
pdfjam f1.pdf f2.pdf f3.pdf 1-3 -o o.pdf   ## first 3 pages from f1,f2,f3 

• {} inserts an empty page
• many options available (ex: scale, offset, trim, frame, nup) -- see pdfjam man

Answer 3

You can use qpdf which comes with ubuntu. This following command for example puts the pages in reverse order.

qpdf --empty --pages infile.pdf z-1 -- outfile.pdf

You can find more information and other examples here on pages 10 and 11.

Answer 4

qpdf works like a charm (tested under cygwin, don't say it), preserving the links within the pdf required me to not use the --empty option and to replace it with the input filename:

qpdf input.pdf --pages input.pdf 1,4,5,7-r8,2,3,r7-z -- output.qpdf.pdf

(rN to select a page indexed from end, z for last page)