PDFknife 2026.7.28.1

Command line tools to manipulate PDF files

PDFknife

A Swiss Army Knife sort of python scripts collection to manipulate PDFs. It relies on:

• pdfjam
• pdftk
• pdfunite (poppler)
• ghostscript
• mupdf-tools

Install

The project is available on pypi: https://pypi.org/project/PDFknife/

pip install PDFknife

Tools

• pdfknife-A5 -- Arrange two A5 pages side by side on A4 paper
• pdfknife-clean -- Recompress and clean a PDF with Ghostscript
• pdfknife-cut -- Cut margin marks and toolbox artefacts off a PDF
• pdfknife-even -- Extract only even pages from a PDF
• pdfknife-extract -- Extract embedded images and fonts from a PDF
• pdfknife-margin -- Add a white margin around PDF pages
• pdfknife-merge -- Merge several PDF files into one
• pdfknife-recto -- Arrange two A5 recto pages side by side on A4 (top-to-bottom)
• pdfknife-reverse -- Reverse page order of a PDF
• pdfknife-rotate -- Rotate all pages of a PDF by a given angle
• pdfknife-shrink -- Compress/reduce file size of PDFs with Ghostscript
• pdfknife-split -- Split a multi-page PDF into separate single-page PDFs
• pdfknife-tearpages -- Remove the first and/or last page of a PDF
• pdfknife-trim -- Trim (crop) edges of PDF pages

License

BSD3, See LICENSE file.