stapler 1.0.0

select/delete (called with sel and del, respectively)

sel is also available as cat for compatibility with my personal muscle memory. :)

With select, you can cherry-pick pages from pdfs and concatenate them into a new pdf file.

Input files can be associated with handles for use with ranges later. A handle is a single, upper-case letter:

<input handle>=<input>

Syntax:

stapler sel input1 page_or_range [page_or_range ...] [input2 p_o_r ...]

Examples:

# concatenate a and b into output.pdf
stapler sel a.pdf b.pdf output.pdf

# generate a pdf file called output.pdf with the following pages:
# 1, 4-8 in 180° (D for down), 20-40 from a.pdf, 1-5 from b.pdf in
# this order
stapler sel a.pdf 1 4-8D 20-40 b.pdf 1-5 output.pdf

# the same example with a handle for b.pdf
stapler sel B=b.pdf a.pdf 1 4-8D 20-40 B1-5 output.pdf

# generate a pdf file called output.pdf with the following pages:
# 1 from a.pdf, 1-5 from b.pdf, 4-8 in 180° (D for down), 20-40 from a.pdf
# this order
stapler sel A=a.pdf B=b.pdf A1 B1-5 A4-8D A20-40 output.pdf

# reverse some of the pages in a.pdf by specifying a negative range
stapler sel a.pdf 1-3 9-6 10 output.pdf

The delete command works almost exactly the same as select, but inverse. It uses the pages and ranges which you didn’t specify.

split/burst:

Splits the specified pdf files into their single pages and writes each page into it’s own pdf file with this naming scheme:

${origname}_${zero-padded page no}.pdf

Syntax:

stapler split input1 [input2 input3 ...]

Example for a file foobar.pdf with 20 pages:

$ stapler split foobar.pdf
$ ls
foobar_01.pdf foobar_02.pdf ... foobar_19.pdf foobar_20.pdf

Multiple files can be specified, they will be processed as if you called single instances of stapler.

zip:

With zip, you can cherry-pick pages from pdfs (like select). The pages from each pdf are merged together in an interleaving manner. This can be used to collate a pdf with odd pages and a pdf with even pages into a single file.

Syntax: stapler zip input1 [range[rotation]] [range …] [input2 [range…] …] out

Examples:

# combine a pdf with odd pages and a pdf with even pages into output.pdf
stapler zip odd.pdf even.pdf output.pdf

# combine a.pdf b.pdf and c.pdf, but use only some pages of c.pdf and
#  rotate b.pdf right (90° clockwise) and rotate c.pdf left (90° counter-
# clockwise)
stapler zip a.pdf b.pdf 1-endR c.pdf 1-3L output.pdf

If one of the ranges is shorter than the others, stapler will continue to merge the remaining pages.

info:

Shows information on the metadata stored inside a PDF file.

Syntax:

stapler info foo.pdf

Example output:

\*\*\* Metadata for foo.pdf

/ModDate:  D:20100313082451+01'00'
/CreationDate:  D:20100313082451+01'00'
/Producer:  GPL Ghostscript 8.70
/Title:  foo.pdf
/Creator:  PDFCreator Version 0.9.9
/Keywords:
/Author:  John Doe
/Subject:

list-logical:

Shows each logical page number and the associated physical page number.

Syntax:

stapler list-logical foo.pdf

Example output:

A-1 1
C-1 2
D-1 3
D-2 4
D-3 5
D-4 6