cat

Concatenate pages from input PDFs into a new PDF

Usage

pdftl <input>... cat <spec>... output <file> [<option>...]

Details

The cat operation is used to assemble pages from one or more PDFs. Input PDFs can be assigned to handles (e.g., A=one.pdf B=two.pdf). Each spec may refer to these handles to select pages or page ranges. When no handle is specified, the first input file is used.

Considerable effort is made to do “the right thing” as regards hyperlinks and any outlines (table of contents). Since cat is quite flexible, exactly what the right thing is sometimes not clearly defined, but nevertheless if you do get a clearly incorrect output, then please report it as a bug.

Examples

Concatenate two entire files

pdftl A=doc1.pdf B=doc2.pdf cat A B output combined.pdf

Select a range of pages from one file:

pdftl in.pdf cat 1-5 9-end output partial.pdf

Double the size of pages 1-5 and rotate east. Zoom out (e.g., A4 to A3) and turn pages 9-end left.

pdftl in.pdf cat 1-5x2east 9-endleftz-1 output partial.pdf

Concatenate pages 1-5 from a.pdf with pages 3,6,9,… from b.pdf

pdftl A=a.pdf B=b.pdf cat A1-5 B3-endstep3 output result.pdf

Tags: from_scratch, page_order

Source: pdftl.operations.cat

Read online: https://pdftl.readthedocs.io/en/stable/operations/cat.html

Type: Operation