Stapler is a pure Python alternative to PDFtk, a tool for manipulating PDF documents from the command line.

PDFtk was written in Java and C++, and is natively compiled with gcj. Sadly, it has been discontinued a few years ago and bitrot is setting in (e.g., it does not compile easily on a number of platforms).

Philip Stark decided to look for an alternative and found pypdf, a PDF library written in pure Python. He couldn't find a tool which actually used the library, so he started writing his own.

This version of stapler is Fred Wenzel's fork of the project, with a completely refactored source code, tests, and added functionality.

Like pdftk, stapler is a command-line tool. If you would like to add a GUI, compile it into a binary for your favorite platform, or contribute anything else, feel free to fork and send me a pull request.

Stapler version 0.2 was written in 2009 by Philip Stark. Stapler version 0.3 was written in 2010 by Fred Wenzel.

For a list of contributors, check the CONTRIBUTORS file.

Stapler is distributed under a BSD license. A copy of the BSD Style License used can be found in the file LICENSE.

There are the following modes in Stapler:

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

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, 20-40 from a.pdf, 1-5 from b.pdf in this order
stapler sel a.pdf 1 4-8 20-40 b.pdf 1-5 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.

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.

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: