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Remove a textual watermark from a PDF file.
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| zngguvnf's Blog | |
| Processing multiple PDFs using the command line | |
| :linux: | |
| <2017-12-01> | |
| Update [2018-04-17 Tue] | |
| Remove password from pdf | |
| Remove string from pdf | |
| Update [2018-03-30 Fri]: | |
| qpdf commands as alternativ to pdftk which is no longer available for fedora. | |
| Quote Stackexchange answer to 'How can I reduce the file size of a scanned PDF file?' | |
| From time to time I need to process lots of .pdf files. | |
| Here are a few commandline calls that help me a lot: | |
| Split pdf in single pages | |
| Split one .pdf with multiple pages in multiple .pdf files with just one page. | |
| pdftk PdfWithMultiplePages.pdf burst | |
| qpdf --split-pages input.pdf output.pdf | |
| Merge pages to single pdf | |
| Merge multiple .pdf with one or more pages into one single .pdf. | |
| To merge all .pdf in currenct directory to one single file: | |
| pdftk ./*.pdf cat output PdfWithMultiplePages.pdf | |
| Alternatively to can type pdftk, mark all files you want to combine in your file manager, drag and drop them to your terminal and finish the command with cat output PDFWithMultiplePages.pdf | |
| pdfjam ./*pdf -o PdfWithMultiplePages.pdf | |
| Convert from DIN A3 (landscape) to DIN A4 portrait | |
| Sometimes .pdf are in DIN A3 (landscape) and it looks like two DIN A4 pages side by side. | |
| Use the following command to split those documents: | |
| mutool poster -y 2 input.pdf output.pdf | |
| (use -y to preform a vertical split or -x for a horizontal split.) mutool comes as part of mupdf (sudo apt install mupdf-tools) | |
| Convert to DIN A4 | |
| pdfjam --outfile filename.pdf --paper a4paper filename.pdf | |
| Batch processing | |
| To convert all .pdf files including those in subfolders to a4 | |
| for f in ./**/*.pdf ; do | |
| pdfjam --outfile "$f" --paper a4paper "$f" | |
| done | |
| Reduce file size of scanned PDF file | |
| There is a question for this on stackexchange and a fantastic answer, which I would like to insert here for reference: | |
| Use the following ghostscript command: | |
| gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf | |
| -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen lower quality, smaller size. | |
| -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook for better quality, but slightly larger pdfs. | |
| -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress output similar to Acrobat Distiller "Prepress Optimized" setting | |
| -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer selects output similar to the Acrobat Distiller "Print Optimized" setting | |
| -dPDFSETTINGS=/default selects output intended to be useful across a wide variety of uses, possibly at the expense of a larger output file | |
| Remove password from pdf | |
| qpdf -password=YourTopSecretPassword -decrypt password-protected-file.pdf file-without-password.pdf | |
| Remove string from pdf | |
| (works to remove text that you can mark in the pdf) | |
| qpdf --stream-data=uncompress YourFile.pdf uncompressed.pdf | |
| Replace 'Some Text' with whitespace | |
| sed 's/Some Text/ /g' < uncompressed.pdf > uncompressed_without_string.pdf | |
| If you want to replace things other than letters (such as brackets), the sed manual will help you. Sometimes it is helpful to remove the desired expression in individual steps (but watch out that you only delete it where you want it to be deleted). | |
| qpdf --stream-data=compress uncompressed_without_string.pdf YourFile_free.pdf | |
| Comments | |
| If you have comments, questions or opinions please drop me a line at blog AT zngguvnf dot org. Please tell me whether it's ok to publish your comment here or not. | |
| archive | |
| Creative Commons License | |
| https://zngguvnf.org by zngguvnf is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. |
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| #!/bin/bash | |
| # Remove a textual watermark from a PDF file. Requires: | |
| # - qpdf (brew install qpdf) | |
| # - pdftx (https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/pdftk_server-2.02-mac_osx-10.11-setup.pkg) | |
| # - coreutils (brew install coreutils) | |
| # | |
| # Tested on macOS 10.12 Sierra. | |
| if [[ -z $3 ]]; then | |
| echo "Usage: ./remove-watermark.sh WATERMARK input.pdf output.pdf" | |
| exit | |
| fi | |
| WATERMARK=$1 | |
| INBOUND=$2 | |
| OUTBOUND=$3 | |
| UNCOMPRESSED=`mktemp 'uncompressed-XXXXXXXXXX.pdf'` | |
| FIXED=`mktemp 'fixed-XXXXXXXXXX.pdf'` | |
| UNMARKED=`mktemp 'unmarked-XXXXXXXXXX.pdf'` | |
| WATERMARKLEN=${#WATERMARK} | |
| BLANKS=`printf %${WATERMARKLEN}s` | |
| qpdf --stream-data=uncompress "${INBOUND}" $UNCOMPRESSED | |
| gsed -e 's/'"${WATERMARK}"'/'"${BLANKS}"'/g' < $UNCOMPRESSED > $FIXED | |
| pdftk $FIXED output $UNMARKED | |
| qpdf --stream-data=compress $UNMARKED "${OUTBOUND}" | |
| rm $UNCOMPRESSED $FIXED $UNMARKED | |
| # NO WARRANTY | |
| # | |
| # THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS | |
| # OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF | |
| # MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND | |
| # NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE | |
| # LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION | |
| # OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION | |
| # WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. |
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