An easy way to Spilt or Merge PDF Files in Linux

I work as  the IT guy of a school that runs free software on all our computers. So far majority of our computing needs has been  met by free software. ( all of them if we exclude matlab and some freedom hating multimedia  codecs.) One area that has been quite shaky is a good tool that can be used for merging different pdf files into one. There is a tool called pdftk but its command-line and while i don’t have a problem using it,  its hardly the tool i want to recommend for our  staffs and students,  so when this morning i saw a dent on identi.ca about a tool called PDF-Shuffler which among other things provide an easy way to merge PDF files i decided to to Investigate.

PDF-Shuffler is a small python-gtk application, which helps the user to merge or split PDF documents. You can also rotate, crop and rearrange their pages using an interactive and intuitive graphical interface.

Source: Softpedia

I tested  it and found pdfshuffler so easy to use that it might amount to waste of space writing about how to use it. Once you import pdf(s) its splits it into pages which can be rearrange by dragging them with your mouse, you can also delete any page you don’t want.

Here is a Screencast

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90zJC1Y2D7M]

Installation

Debian/Ubuntu users can download a Deb here which can be installed by double clicking on it (the installer might download other dependencies from the Debian/Ubuntu repositories which the application needs to install but it does this automatically)

Edit: I tried installing this on Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy heron) but its threw up some dependencies errors. which i got round by installing the following packages from the ubuntu 9.04 repositories

http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/p/python-pypdf/python-pypdf_1.12-1_all.deb

http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/p/python-pdftools/python-pdftools_0.37-1_all.deb

Everything went fine from then on.

Once installed you can launch it from Application/Graphic/Pdf-Shuffler

Other Linux Distributions

I can either download the source package and compile it from source, or search Google for a package compiled for their distribution for their distribution Thanks to pete who pointed out that

Since it is a python application people do not need a distribution specific package. They can just download the source package, unpackage it and run the file “pdfshuffler” ($python pdfshuffler) assuming that all required additional packages (http://pybrary.net/pyPdf/) are installed on the system. Maybe it’s worth to tell a little about that. Advantage is here that even a user without root privileges can run it.

here are the dependencies that pdf-shuffler needs to run

· pyPdf 1.10 or later
· Python
· PyGTK

( I found an rpm for fedora 11 here and one for suse 11 here )

Hope this helps somebody