April 3, 2024

Remove pages from a pdf file from the command line with pdfseparate and pdfunite

First separate the pages of the pdf. To do so run:

$ pdfseparate file.pdf file-%d.pdf

which will output file-1.pdf, file-2.pdf, file-3.pdf etc.

Then merge the pages you want to keep, for example:

$ pdfunite file-1.pdf file-3.pdf

Note: I’ve not found a utility to remove pages, for example a command to remove page number 2 would be: $ pdfremove -p 2 input.pdf output.pdf, or to remove a range: $ pdfremove -p {2..7} input.pdf output.pdf. Maybe this can be done with a bash script using pdfseparate and pdfunite.

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