Concatenating pages with PDFTK

Chris Noxz

October 21, 2023

howto

PDFTK (PDF Toolkit) is a command-line tool that allows users to manipulate PDF files in various ways, including combining, splitting, and modifying PDF documents. This article focuses on using PDFTK to concatenate a range of pages from one or more PDF files into a new PDF file.

Overview

Concatenation is the process of merging multiple PDF files or a range of pages from one or more PDF files into a single PDF document. PDFTK simplifies this task with a straightforward command-line interface. The resulting PDF file retains the original order of pages, allowing for various use cases such as merging chapters of a book, assembling reports, or creating custom presentations.

Concatenating Pages

To concatenate a range of pages from one or more PDF files into a new PDF file, follow these steps:

Open the Terminal or Command Prompt:

Launch your system’s terminal or command prompt. Ensure that PDFTK is installed and available in your system’s PATH.

Use the `cat` Command:

The cat command is used to concatenate pages. The basic syntax for concatenating PDF files or pages is as follows:

pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf cat output output.pdf

Replace file1.pdf, file2.pdf, and output.pdf with the appropriate file names and paths. This command concatenates file1.pdf and file2.pdf into a new PDF file called output.pdf.

Concatenate Specific Pages:

To concatenate specific pages from a source PDF file, use the cat command with a range specification. For example, to concatenate pages 3 to 6 from source.pdf, use the following command:

pdftk source.pdf cat 3-6 output output.pdf

This command concatenates pages 3 to 6 from source.pdf into a new PDF file called output.pdf.

Concatenate Multiple Ranges:

You can concatenate multiple ranges of pages from a single PDF file or from multiple PDF files into the same output file. For example:

pdftk A=source1.pdf B=source2.pdf cat A1-3 B4-6 A4 output output.pdf

This command concatenates pages 1 to 3 from source1.pdf and pages 4 to 6 from source2.pdf and page 4 from source1.pdf into a new PDF file called output.pdf.

Conclusion

PDFTK is a powerful tool for concatenating pages from one or more PDF file into a new PDF document. Whether you need to merge chapters of a book, assemble a report, or create custom presentations, PDFTK provides a convenient and efficient way to perform these tasks. With the ability to specify page ranges, you have full control over the content you want to include in the final document.