pdfmt - The PDF Multi-Tool

pdfmt is a command-line toolkit for the PDF tasks you keep doing again and again.

Merge PDFs. Split them. Extract pages. Reorder documents. Scan from your scanner and OCR them. Add stamps. And when a task becomes repetitive, turn it into a reusable workflow.

No GUI required. No cloud upload required. Just your PDFs, your terminal, and the tools you already use.

MT stands for Multi-Tool. pdfmt brings many small PDF operations together behind one consistent command-line interface.

A project from eifelcode.com.

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Why pdfmt?

Working with PDFs often means reaching for a different tool for every little task:

• "I only need pages 2, 4 and 6."
• "I need to split this 100-page PDF."
• "I scanned the front and back separately. Now I need to put them back together."
• "I need to merge these five documents."
• "I need to add a processed stamp."
• "I need to OCR my documents."
• "I have to do this every week."

pdfmt is designed for exactly these situations.

Instead of remembering a collection of different commands, options, pipes and tools, you can use one interface:

pdfmt <command> <subcommand> [arguments]

And because pdfmt is a command-line tool, it works just as well interactively as it does in scripts and automated workflows.

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Get started

Once pdfmt is installed, you can immediately start working with your PDFs.

Merge documents

pdfmt merge all cover.pdf report.pdf appendix.pdf complete.pdf

Split a PDF into individual pages

pdfmt split all document.pdf page_

This creates:

page_1.pdf
page_2.pdf
page_3.pdf
...

Extract pages

pdfmt extract range document.pdf 1-3,7,10-12 extracted.pdf

Remove pages

pdfmt remove range document.pdf 5,8-10 cleaned.pdf

Reorder pages

pdfmt sort reverse document.pdf reversed.pdf

Add a stamp

pdfmt stamp text invoice.pdf "Paid on 2026-08-28" invoice-paid.pdf

And when you need something more complex, combine these commands into a workflow.

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Real-world examples

pdfmt is particularly useful when several simple PDF operations need to be combined.

Scan a stack of single-page documents

You have a stack of invoices or delivery notes. Your scanner can scan the entire stack, but each document should become its own PDF.

pdfmt scan adf invoices.pdf
pdfmt split all invoices.pdf invoice_

You now have:

invoice_1.pdf
invoice_2.pdf
invoice_3.pdf
...

No need to scan every document individually.

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Scan double-sided documents without a duplex scanner

Your scanner has an ADF, but it cannot scan both sides automatically.

Scan the front sides:

pdfmt scan adf front.pdf

Turn the stack over and scan the back sides:

pdfmt scan adf back.pdf

Then reconstruct the correct page order:

pdfmt merge duplex front.pdf back.pdf documents.pdf

If every physical document consists of two pages, split the result into individual documents:

pdfmt split length documents.pdf 2 document_

You end up with:

document_1.pdf
document_2.pdf
document_3.pdf
...

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Split documents with different page counts

Sometimes a scanned PDF contains several documents with different lengths.

For example, if the first document consists of pages 1–4 and 6, the second of pages 7–10, and the third of pages 11–12:

pdfmt split range documents.pdf 1-4,6 7-10 11-12 document_

The result is:

document_1.pdf
document_2.pdf
document_3.pdf

Each output can contain a completely different page range.

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Reuse a cover page

You can also include the same page in several output documents:

pdfmt split range document.pdf 1-7 1,8-10 1,11-14 split_doc_

Here, page 1 becomes part of every resulting PDF.

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Add an OCR text layer to a PDF document

If you have scanned documents, you can simply add an OCR text layer and then search for text within those PDFs:

# add the OCR text layer
pdfmt ocr add file-without-ocr.pdf file-with-ocr.pdf

# show the OCR text layer (to use with grep)
pdfmt ocr show file-with-ocr.pdf

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Mark an invoice as processed

You received an invoice as a PDF and want to mark it as processed:

pdfmt stamp text invoice.pdf "Paid on 2026-08-28" invoice-paid.pdf

The result is a new PDF with the stamp applied.

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Workflows

Sometimes one command isn't enough.

A workflow lets you turn several pdfmt commands into one reusable command.

For example, scanning both sides of a document with a scanner that does not support hardware duplex scanning normally requires several steps:

1. Scan the front.
2. Turn the paper stack around.
3. Scan the back.
4. Put the pages back into the correct order.
5. Clean up temporary files.

With a workflow, all of that can become:

pdfmt workflow run scan-duplex adf output.pdf

A workflow is simply an executable shell script like this one, a simplified version of scan-duplex from the official pdfmt-workflows repository (see also pre-defined workflows below):

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Scan both sides of a document and merge them into a single PDF.

pdfmt scan "$1" front.pdf
read -r -p "Turn the paper stack and press ENTER to continue..."
pdfmt scan "$1" back.pdf
pdfmt merge duplex front.pdf back.pdf "$2"
rm front.pdf back.pdf

This is intentionally simple. Workflows are just shell scripts, so you can combine pdfmt with other command-line tools as well.

List available workflows

pdfmt workflow list

Inspect a workflow

pdfmt workflow info scan-duplex

Create your own workflow

Place an executable script in one of your configured workflow directories:

~/.local/share/pdfmt/workflows/
└── my-workflow

The third line is used as the workflow description:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# =============================...
# My custom PDF workflow.
#
# ...

Then run it like any other pdfmt command:

pdfmt workflow run my-workflow ...

This makes workflows useful for anything you find yourself doing repeatedly.

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Pre-defined workflows

If you don't want to write workflows from scratch, check out the official pdfmt-workflows repository for ready-to-use community scripts.

To install a pre-defined workflow, download the script into your local workflows directory and make it executable:

WORKFLOW_NAME=scan-duplex  #< Name of the workflow to install

# Download and install workflow
curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eifelcode/pdfmt-workflows/main/workflows/$WORKFLOW_NAME -o ~/.local/share/pdfmt/workflows/$WORKFLOW_NAME
chmod +x ~/.local/share/pdfmt/workflows/$WORKFLOW_NAME

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What can pdfmt do?

pdfmt currently provides commands for:

For detailed command usage, run:

pdfmt <command> help

For example:

pdfmt split help
pdfmt merge help
pdfmt scan help
pdfmt workflow help

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Command Overview

Below is a quick overview of all available commands. To get detailed usage instructions for a specific command, simply run pdfmt <command> help.

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Installation

Requirements

pdfmt requires Bash 4.3 or newer.

The required runtime tools are:

Not every command requires every dependency. For example, SANE is only needed for the scan command and OCRmyPDF is only needed for ocr add.

Linux

On Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install bash pdftk imagemagick sane-utils

Other Linux distributions may use different package names.

macOS

Using Homebrew:

brew install bash pdftk-java imagemagick sane-backends

macOS ships with Bash 3.2, which is too old for pdfmt. Make sure a newer Bash version is available.

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Install pre-built binary from GitHub

Download the latest release binary directly via terminal:

# Download the latest binary
curl -sSL https://github.com/eifelcode/pdfmt/releases/latest/download/pdfmt -o pdfmt

# Make it executable
chmod +x pdfmt

# Move it to your PATH (e.g., /usr/local/bin or ~/.local/bin)
sudo mv pdfmt /usr/local/bin/

Alternatively, visit the Releases Page to manually download the pdfmt file for a specific version.

Install from source

Clone the repository and use the included Makefile to build and install pdfmt into /usr/local/bin:

make
make install

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Configuration

pdfmt creates configuration files when they are needed. This means you can start using commands without having to configure everything beforehand.

Configuration files are stored below:

~/.config/pdfmt/

Scanner configuration

The scan command uses:

~/.config/pdfmt/scan.conf

The configuration includes:

The scanner device can be identified with:

scanimage -f "%d" | head -n 1

Stamp configuration

The stamp text command uses:

~/.config/pdfmt/stamp_text.conf

Available settings include:

Workflow configuration

The workflow command uses:

~/.config/pdfmt/workflow.conf

Available settings include:

OCR configuration

The ocr command uses:

~/.config/pdfmt/ocr.conf

Available settings include:

Note: If a configured plugin like ocrmypdf_rapidocr is not installed on the system, pdfmt ocr add will exit with a clear error message rather than creating faulty PDFs.

Recommendation for OCR: RapidOCR or EasyOCR

pdfmt uses OCRmyPDF for text recognition, which also supports plugins. For optimal performance and accuracy (especially on CPUs and Intel Macs), the RapidOCR plugin is recommended. If you need maximum recognition quality on complex layouts and have a powerful GPU and RAM available, take a look at EasyOCR.

After installing your preferred plugin, you can enable it by updating the configuration file:

# Enable RapidOCR:
ocr.plugin=ocrmypdf_rapidocr

Note: If you get errors like ValueError: Unsupported rec.lang_type='latin' for PP-OCRv6 small model. ensure the correct model for RapidOCR is installed.

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A command-line tool that stays out of your way

pdfmt is designed around a simple idea:

Small PDF operations should be easy to combine.

Use one command when one command is enough.

Use several commands when you need to process a document.

And when you find yourself typing the same sequence again and again, turn it into a workflow.

Because pdfmt is a command-line tool, it can also be used from shell scripts, cron jobs, automation and other command-line workflows.

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Development

pdfmt is an open-source project built with Bash.

The project is organized into small, isolated commands under sources/command/.

Tests use bashunit and shell scripts are checked with ShellCheck.

The required runtime tools for development are:

Run the complete test suite with:

make test

To contribute to pdfmt, see:

• CONTRIBUTE.md
• PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md
• RELEASE.md

Bug reports, feature requests and contributions are welcome.

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License

pdfmt is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.