pdfmerge: CLI for merging, splicing, and rotating PDFs

Staple the Squirrel

Why?

I find myself merging bits of different PDFs fairly regularly and really wanted a simple CLI way to do it.

Install

python -m pip install pdfmerge

Usage

$ pdfmerge [-h] [--version]
  [-o FILE|--output FILE]
  [-p PASSWORD|--password PASSWORD]
  PATH[RULE[, RULE ...]] [[PATH[RULE, ...]] ...]

• -o, --output output file (default: output.pdf).

• -p, '--password` password for encrypted files (default: empty string).

• PATH a file, directory, or wildcard string (e.g., file*.pdf) of files to merge.

• RULE an optional string indicating which pages to extract and rotate. The syntax for each rule is:

  [START][..][END][ROTATE]
  

  Where START and END are positive (1-based) or negative page numbers and ROTATE is one of >, V, or < indicating a clockwise rotation of 90, 180, 270 degrees, respectively.

Command-line Example

$ pdfmerge -o out.pdf file1.pdf file2.pdf[3,3] file2.pdf[1V,2..-1] "other*.pdf[<]" "/path/pdf[1..4>,5]"

This example illustrates several features:

• specifying an output file
• merging multiple files, some more than once
• splicing parts of file using indices (1-based; negatives allowed)
• including the same page multiple times
• rotating a page or page range
• merging all the PDFs in a directory

Read more about the options

Python Module Usage

pdfmerge can also be imported into python scripts.

from pdfmerge import pdfmerge
pdfmerge(["pdf-1.pdf", "pdf-2.pdf[2>]"], "output.pdf")

License

MIT License