PDFtk Free For Linux

PDFtk Free is an open source, freely distributed, multiplatform and simple command-line software implemented in C++/Java and designed to let users easily and quickly manipulate PDF documents any way they want. The project is also distributed with a server component used for server-side processing of PDFs, as well as a professional edition that includes more features, but costs money.

With PDFtk Free you will be able to merge multiple PDF documents, split PDF pages into a new PDF document, rotate PDF documents and pages, decrypt input, encrypt output, fill PDF forms with XFDF data or FDF data, as well as flatten forms.

The software allows you to apply a foreground stamp or a background watermark, report PDF metrics like bookmarks, metadata and page labels, update PDF metadata, attach files to PDF documents and pages, unpack PDF attachments, burst a PDF document into single pages, repair corrupted PDFs, and uncompress or re-compress page streams.

Deploying and using PDFtk Free on a GNU/Linux computer is not the easiest of tasks, as no installation instructions are provided on the source archive. Basically, you will have to download the ZIP archive from Softpedia, save it on a location of your choice, extract its contents with an archive manager utility, open a terminal emulator app, navigate to ‘pdftk’ folder (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/pdftk-2.02-dist/pdftk) and compile the program for a specific operating system.

At the moment, PDFtk Free is supported on a wide range of Linux and UNIX-like operating systems, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, Slackware, Debian GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. It has been successfully tested on computers supporting either of the 64-bit or 32-bit instruction set architectures.