`import_streams`

Import and apply modified content streams

Usage

pdftl <input> import_streams [normalize=true] <stream_file> output <output>

Details

The import_streams operation reads a text file containing PDF content streams and applies them directly into the target PDF document.

It is designed to perfectly round-trip the output from dump_streams. The primary workflow is to dump a document’s streams to text, use standard Unix text tools (like sed, awk, or manual text editing) to modify the PDF operators, and then pipe the resulting text file back into pdftl using import_streams.

Addressing Mechanism

The operation strictly targets semantic paths described in the headers, ignoring any internal Object IDs ((4:0)).

=== Page 1 / Contents overwrites the main content stream of Page 1.
=== Page 2 / XObject /Fm1 overwrites the stream of the XObject mapped as /Fm1 within Page 2’s resources.
=== Page 1 / XObject /Fm1 / XObject /Fm0 overwrites the nested XObject /Fm0.

Because it relies on semantic paths, you can easily use text tools to migrate streams across entirely different PDF documents by simply swapping the header paths (e.g. using sed to rename the target XObject).

Options

normalize=true (default) — Before writing the stream into the PDF, pdftl uses pikepdf’s internal engine to parse and normalize the syntax. This automatically strips any % comments (such as those generated by dump_streams annotate), cleans up whitespace, and validates the PDF syntax. Pass normalize=false if you want to force raw text byte injection.

Examples

Dump, patch, and re-import Page 1’s content stream using a Unix pipe

pdftl in.pdf dump_streams 1 | sed -e 's/Apple/Banana/' | pdftl in.pdf import_streams - output out.pdf

Apply modifications from a saved text file back into the document

pdftl in.pdf import_streams patched_streams.txt output out.pdf

Inject stream text verbatim, without parsing or stripping comments

pdftl in.pdf import_streams normalize=false streams.txt output out.pdf

Tags: in_place, content_stream, dangerous

Source: pdftl.operations.import_streams

Read online: https://pdftl.readthedocs.io/en/latest/operations/import_streams.html

Type: Operation

import_streams