66 PDF: The Portable Document Format

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The portable document format (pdf) arose as an enhancement to the Postscript format (ps) for document formatting. The tools for working with pdf documents on Linux are very mature and comprehensive. In this chapter we introduce some of the most useful and common capabilities available whilst noting that there are very many more open source tools available for working with pdf documents.

An omnibus of tools for dealing with pdf documents is packaged as Stirling-PDF. Using a web-based user interface, it supports splitting, merging, converting, reorganizing, adding images, rotating, compressing, and more. It began as an entirely ChatGPT written tool and is a locally hosted web application

The general suit of other common tools include, in a very rough order of utility:

pdftk The pdftk command provides a comprehensive collections of operations on pdf documents. pdftk

pdfjam a command line tool that provides quite an extensive collection of options for common pdf document manipulations, including join documents and rearranging the pages of a document. Further information is available from the University of Warwick.

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