PDF, PS and DjVu

• fbgs — Poor man's PostScript/pdf viewer for the linux framebuffer console.

https://www.kraxel.org/blog/linux/fbida/ || fbida

• fbpdf — Small framebuffer PDF and DjVu viewer based on MuPDF, with Vim keybindings and written in C

https://repo.or.cz/w/fbpdf.git || fbpdf-git^AUR

• jfbview — Framebuffer PDF and image viewer. Features include Vim-like controls, zoom-to-fit, a TOC (outline) view and fast multi-threaded rendering.

https://github.com/jichu4n/jfbview || jfbview^AUR

• Adobe Reader — Proprietary PDF file viewer offered by Adobe. Discontinued for Linux.

https://www.adobe.com/products/reader.html || acroread^AUR

• DjView — Viewer for DjVu documents.

http://djvu.sourceforge.net/djview4.html || djview

• Foxit Reader — Small, fast (compared to Acrobat) proprietary PDF viewer. Discontinued for Linux.

https://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf-reader/ || foxitreader^AUR

• gv — Graphical user interface for the Ghostscript interpreter that allows to view and navigate through PostScript and PDF documents.

https://www.gnu.org/software/gv/ || gv

• Zathura — Highly customizable and functional document viewer (plugin based). Supports PDF, DjVu, PostScript and Comicbook.

https://pwmt.org/projects/zathura/ || zathura

Asterisk next to library denotes optional dependency needs to be installed for specified feature.

The PDF forms column in the above table refers to AcroForms support. If you do not need your input to be directly extractable from the PDF, you can also use the applications in #Annotation or #Graphical PDF editing to put text on top of a PDF. PDF forms can be created with LibreOffice Writer (View > Toolbars > Form Controls) and the advanced PDF editors.

The proprietary and deprecated XFA format for forms is not fully supported by Poppler and only supported by Adobe Reader and Master PDF Editor.

Alternatively, web browsers such as Firefox or Chromium feature a built-in PDF viewer capable of filling out forms.

• PDFsam — Open source application, written in Java, supports merging, splitting and rotating.

https://pdfsam.org/ || pdfsam^AUR

• briss — Java GUI to crop pages of PDF documents to one or more regions selected.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/briss/ || briss^AUR

With GraphicsMagick:

$ gm convert 1.jpg 2.jpg 3.jpg out.pdf

With Ghostscript:

$ gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=out.pdf -dBATCH 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf

With PDFtk:

$ pdftk 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf cat output out.pdf

With Poppler:

$ pdfunite 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf out.pdf

With QPDF:

$ qpdf --empty --pages 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf -- out.pdf

With Poppler and maintaining the layout:

$ pdftotext -layout in.pdf out.txt

See also .

This section lists commands to decrypt a PDF to an unencrypted file. Note that most PDF viewers also support encrypted PDFs.

With PDFtk:

$ pdftk in.pdf input_pw password output out.pdf

With Poppler to PostScript:

$ pdftops -upw password in.pdf out.ps

With QPDF:

$ qpdf --decrypt --password=password in.pdf out.pdf

The user password is used for encryption, the owner password to restrict operations once the document is decrypted, for more information, see Wikipedia:PDF#Security and signatures.

With PDFtk:

$ pdftk in.pdf output out.pdf user_pw password

With PoDoFo:

$ podofoencrypt -u user_password -o owner_password in.pdf out.pdf

With QPDF:

$ qpdf --encrypt user_password owner_password key_length -- in.pdf out.pdf

where can be 40, 128 or 256.

With Poppler to JPEG:

$ pdfimages infile.pdf -j outfileroot

With Ghostscript as a single file

$ gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -dFirstPage=first -dLastPage=last -sOutputFile=outfile.pdf infile.pdf

With PDFtk as a single file:

$ pdftk infile.pdf cat first-last output outfile.pdf

With Poppler as separate files:

$ pdfseparate -f first -l last infile.pdf outfileroot-%d.pdf

With QPDF as a single file:

$ qpdf --empty --pages infile.pdf first-last -- outfile.pdf

With mutool as a single file:

$ mutool clean -g infile.pdf outfile.pdf first-last

PDF Imposition (e.g. to combine multiple pages to one page) can be done with pdfjam, for example paper waste can be reduced with pdfnup and pdfbook can be used to arrange PDFs into a format suitable for book binding.

With ExifTool:

$ exiftool file.pdf

With Poppler:

$ pdfinfo file.pdf

With Ghostscript one of:

$ ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen in.pdf out.pdf
$ gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -sOutputFile=out.pdf in.pdf

For different settings see the documentation.

There is also , a script wrapping gs.

With GraphicsMagick to convert a specific page:

$ gm convert -density dpi infile.pdf[page] outfile.jpg

With Poppler to convert all pages:

$ pdftoppm -jpeg -r dpi infile.pdf outfileroot

With Poppler to convert a specific page:

$ pdftoppm -jpeg -r dpi -f page -singlefile infile.pdf outfileroot

With mupdf-tools to split every page vertically into two pages:

$ mutool poster -y 2 in.pdf out.pdf

Can be used to undo simple imposition.

To add an image to any location in PDF can be done with ImageMagick (convert), xv and pdftk. A wrapper script is here and other hints are here.

With :

$ rewritepdf.pl -C in.pdf out.pdf

See https://superuser.com/a/1051543 for more information.

Break Djvu into separate pages:

$ djvmcvt -i input.djvu /path/to/out/dir output-index.djvu

Convert Djvu pages into images:

$ ddjvu --format=tiff page.djvu page.tiff

Convert Djvu pages into PDF:

$ ddjvu --format=pdf inputfile.djvu ouputfile.pdf

You can also use --page to export specific pages:

$ ddjvu --format=tiff --page=1-10 input.djvu output.tiff

this will convert pages from 1 to 10 into one tiff file.

You can use to:

• fix orientation
• split pages
• deskew
• crop
• adjust margins

There is a useful script .

$ img2djvu -c1 -d600 -v1 ./out

it will create 600 DPI from all files in ./out directory.

Alternatively, you can try , which seems to create smaller files especially on images with well defined background.

ps2pdf is a wrapper around ghostscript to convert PostScript to PDF:

$ ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4 -dOptimize=true -dEmbedAllFonts=true YourPSFile.ps

Explanation:

• with you define the paper size. For valid PAPERSIZE values, see .
• -dOptimize=true lets the created PDF be optimised for loading.
• makes the fonts look always nice.

• pdfrw — A pure Python library that reads and writes PDFs.

https://github.com/pmaupin/pdfrw || python-pdfrw, python2-pdfrw^AUR