PDF files : Merge pdf files into one , extract the pages into new one

 Today, we will take a look into he pdf file management. Many a times we come across situations where 

1. We have to extract certain pages of a large pdf file.

2. We have merge several pdf files into a single pdf file.

We are covering the basic usage below. We are using Ubuntu Linux for this exercise.

Merge several files into a single file

'Pdfunite' is the utility that I will be using today. In my example, I have 3 input files (pdf1.pdf, pdf2.pdf, pdf3.pdf)

 

Place all the files to be merged in a folder. Use the terminal to navigate to the folder.

Execute the command as below:

pdfunite is the utility, then we list out all the files in the sequence it has to be added to the resulting file. The last name is the name of the resulting file. The file will be created by the utility.

pdfunite pdf1.pdf pdf2.pdf pdf-result.pdf 

Now you can see that there is a new large file created using the given input pdf files. 

Extract certain pages from a PDF file

I am using the 'pdfseparate' utility for separating the pages out of a large pdf into a small one.

 

In this example, I have a large pdf file called 'pdf-source-file.pdf' and I am extracting the pages 2 to 5 into a new pdf file called 'extracted-pages.pdf'.

the arguments passed to the utility are -f that specifies the first page to extract and -l that specifies the last page to extract. So, all the pages including 2 and 5 are extracted. If you want to extract only one page, provide that page number for both -f and -l parameters.

Foot note: To extract one or more pages, you can use the print as pdf optipn and select only the required pages to print. Make to sure t print in colour so that a colour copy of the required pages is created as a resulting pdf file.😁