convert
is a member of the ImageMagick
software suite for image manipulation.
Two of my earlier posts dealt with using convert
to slice and
resize an image.
It is a lesser-known fact that convert
also works with pdf
files.
I'd previously explained how to merge and
split up pdf
files using tools such as pdftk
and gs
.
In this post, I'll illustrate how to do the same using the convert
program.
First, you need to install convert
which is packaged in the ImageMagick
suite.
$ sudo apt-get install imagemagick
Merging 2 pdf
files (file1
and file2
) into a new file (output
) is as simple as executing:
$ convert file1.pdf file2.pdf output.pdf
You can merge a subset of pages instead of the entire input files.
To accomplish that, use the angle brackets to specify the target subset of pages.
For example, to merge page 1 of file1
with pages 1, 2 and 4 of file2
,
run the following command:
$ convert file1.pdf[0] file2.pdf[0-1,3] output.pdf
Note that page numbers are zero-based. Therefore, [0] is page 1, and [0-1] are the pages ranging from page 1 to page 2.
Finally, the following example splits up input
into 2 files: first2output
and next2output
.
The former output file contains pages 1 and 2 from the original file; the latter, pages 3 and 4.
$ convert input.pdf[0-1] first2output.pdf
$ convert input.pdf[2-3] next2output.pdf
As you can see, convert
is a versatile utility program to manipulate both image and pdf files.
5 comments:
Hi,
Thanks for sharing very useful information on Linux
SystoTech PDF Split and Merge is another good solution available free for combining two or more PDF files or breaking a large PDF file into parts. Read more details: http://www.systotech.com/pdf-split-and-merge.aspx
It worked fine but the quality of the PDF Image is AWFUL!
It might be suitable for PDF with loads of text!
I had the same problem.
I had much better results with pdfseparate, which is part of the poppler project http://poppler.freedesktop.org
From the docs:
pdfseparate sample.pdf sample-%d.pdf
extracts all pages from sample.pdf, if i.e. sample.pdf has 3 pages, it produces
sample-1.pdf, sample-2.pdf, sample-3.pdf
Or, to select a single page (in this case, the first page) from the file sample.pdf:
pdfseparate -f 1 -l 1 sample.pdf sample-1.pdf
This is a terrible solution. All your text and nice vector data becomes raster pictures with pretty low resolution. And the document now has even more size than before splitting!
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