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PDF editing with pdftk

Today I had quite a problem trying to edit a 100 page PDF file. I tried using PDFedit, but I could not find any feature to take a page range and turn that into a new PDF file. One primitive method in PDFedit was to delete the pages I did not want and save the remaining pages as a new file, but when dealing with hundreds of pages this can be quite time consuming, therefore PDFedit wasn't useful for me.

A quick post to ubuntuforums.org and an hour or two later someone suggested I use pdftk. This applications works through the terminal and does the job very easily and very quickly.

Assuming my original file is called input.pdf here is an example of cutting out the first 48 pages and turning them into a new PDF file called output.pdf:

pdftk input.pdf cat 1-48 output output.pdf

No need to launch an application and click through various menus. One simple and easy to understand command does the whole job in under a minute.

Perfect.