There is a small problem with pdftk: It’s no longer supported, and it cannot handle PDF files that use some of the newer PDF features. Take a look at the page that lits pdftk sample command lines to learn more about what is supported. It is a tool to do a number of things with PDF files (concatenate files, break a multi-page file into individual page documents, flatten forms, …). All that’s needed is a supported operating system. Because of that, pdftk does not require Java anymore.
#JAVA PDF TOOLBOX MAC OS#
Sid Steward took the iText Java source code and run it through a compiler to create a native binary for Windows, Mac OS and Linux. Pdftk is an application that’s based on iText. I have not done anything serious in Java in years (a decade?), but it does not take me long to take iText and whip something up that can almost perform miracles with PDF files. In addition to being very powerful, it’s also relatively easy to use. This is a very powerful PDF library for Java. Sometimes that functionality comes in handy. In addition to that, XPDF also comes with a bunch of tools to extract text or images from a PDF file. The same reasons I gave for Ghostscript also apply to XPDF. The error messages Acrobat provides are not very verbose, Ghostscript can give me a stack dump, and if necessary I can even run it in the debugger to figure out exactly what’s going on. When a PDF file is not behaving correctly, I run the file through Ghostscript to see if it fails in the same way, or if I can get more detailed error messages out of that application. Oftentimes it is beneficial to have a non-Adobe PDF renderer. Especially when dealing with forms submission or electronic comments, it is necessary to make sure that Reader behaves correctly. This one is pretty straight forward: I use it to make sure that PDFs created in Adobe Acrobat work correctly when opened in a web browser or directly in Reader. That’s either done as a plug-in or as JavaScript, for demo purposes I occasionally also write sample VB programs that utilize Acrobat’s Inter-application Communication API. The preflight tool allows to check for syntax errors in PDF files, traverse the internal structure of PDF documents, look at fonts, … Sure, there are other tools that can do some of these tasks as well, but there is no other tool that covers the broad range of features available in Acrobat. Optimize, preflight, manage colors, insert pages, extract pages, remove pages, change page boxes, create interactive forms… Do I need to say more? Pretty much anything that’s possible with a PDF document can be done with Acrobat. If you want the best quality PDF document, how can you go wrong with the Distiller from the people who invented PDF? There are many ways to create PDF files, but for high quality press work, I would not trust any other application. Here are a few tasks that I use Acrobat for: It’s not cheap, but if you require any of the features that no other tool provides, it’s worth it. It’s the solution to problems you did not even know you had… Most people only use a small fraction of the features that Acrobat provides. This of course is the mother ship, the ultimate tool for creating, processing, editing PDF documents.
What tools am I using to create/process/debug PDF documents? Here is list of my top tools and why I like them.
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