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PDF File Processing Tools

Ghostscript (gs)

Free and Cross Platform Software Suite

gs is an interpreter for the PostScript® and PDF files

  • Use -sDEVICE=pdfwrite to work with PDF files

Useful Examples

  • extracting pages (e.g., in this case the first five pages) from a source file source-file.pdf to output pages-1-5.pdf 

    gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dFirstPage=1 -dLastPage=5 -sOutputFile=pages-1-5.pdf source-file.pdf

  • combining multiple PDF files (e.g., part-1.pdf, part-2.pdf, and part-3.pdf) to form a combine.pdf 

    gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite  -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sOutputFile=combine.pdf part-[1-3].pdf
    !!! tip "Regular Expression (regex) Match" The expression part-[1-3].pdf in the above example corresponds to a regular expression that identifies files with name of part-1.pdf, part-2.pdf, and part-3.pdf.

Frequently Used Arguments

arguments effect
-dNOPAUSE no pause after page
-g<width>x<height> page size in pixels
-sDEVICE=<devname> select device
-q "quiet", fewer messages
-r<res> pixels/inch resolution
-dBATCH exit after last file
-sOutputFile=<file> select output file