I have long been a keen user of pdftk, the PDF Toolkit, but am frequently surprised when people have not heard of it. True, it is a command line tool, but it is easy to incorporate into service menus, scripts etc and doubtless there is a GUI front-end for it somewhere (in fact there is one linked to from the above page).

Clearly a blog post is called for, but, whilst you wait for a post that will never arrive, here is a link to some examples that should open your eyes to what is possible with pdftk.

To get started on a Debian-based system:

$ sudo apt-get install pdftk
$ man pdftk

Enjoy.

XPS is Microsoft’s attempt to replace PDF, the only difference is that everyone can read PDFs, and not everyone can read XPS. I understand that KDE 4 versions of Okular will support XPS, which may make these instructions unnecessary, although having a tool for conversion readily at hand is always useful!

These instructions were tested in Debian Lenny. These instructions worked for our specific systems YMMV.

Building from source

$ sudo apt-get install libxext-dev libxt-dev
$ wget http://ghostscript.com/releases/ghostpdl-8.71.tar.bz2
$ tar xvvjf ghostpdl-8.71.tar.bz2
$ cd ghostpdl-8.71
$ make xps

Testing

After the build you will find gxps in xps/obj

To test, you will need a test document in XPS format.

$ cd xps/obj
$ ./gxps -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=test.pdf -dNOPAUSE test.xps

Move to bin

You probably want to move the gxps executable into a convenient location within your PATH. /usr/local/bin may be a good destination. Once there you ought to be able to run the command from anywhere and it just work. Not sure what your PATH is? Type “echo $PATH” in your terminal.

$ echo $PATH
$ sudo cp xps/obj/gxps /usr/local/bin/
$ sudo chown root:root /usr/local/bin/gxps

Creating file type

XPS probably does not exist on your Linux system as a file type, you can either create yourself using KDE Control Centre, or in KDE:

Single user:
~/.kde/share/mimelnk/application/xps.desktop

All users:
/usr/share/mimelnk/application/xps.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Comment=XPS Document
Hidden=false
Icon=application-xps
MimeType=application/xps
Patterns=*.xps;*.XPS
Type=MimeType
X-KDE-AutoEmbed=false

Adding to ServiceMenu

If you are using Konqueror, you can add a service menu (to enable right-click / action menu).

Single user:
~/.kde/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus/xpstopdf.desktop

All users:
/usr/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus/xpstopdf.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=xpstopdf service menu
ServiceTypes=application/xps
Icon=acroread
Actions=xpstopdf

[Desktop Action xpstopdf]
Icon=acroread
Name=Convert XPS to PDF
Exec=cd "%d"; gxps -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile="`echo "%f" | cut -d . -f 1`.pdf" -dNOPAUSE "%f"; mv "%f" ~/.local/share/Trash/files; kdialog --title "Convert XPS to PDF" --passivepopup "Done" 3; echo;

Testing ServiceMenu

You should now be able to right-click on the file and “Convert XPS to PDF”. This will create a PDF of the same name and move the XPS into trash.

References

• http://www.ghostscript.com/GhostPCL.html
• http://obscured.info/2010/03/01/converting-xps-to-pdf-on-ubuntu-9-10/
• http://blog.rubypdf.com/2009/04/14/convert-xps-to-pdf-in-two-ways/

To set this up, you need to install pdftotext. This application is available in either poppler-utils or xpdf-utils - most people seem to use the latter, but I suspect the former is probably a better option for a text-only server. I installed poppler-utils.

Next create (or edit) the ~/.mailcap file, so that it has the following line:

application/pdf;                pdftotext -layout %s -; copiousoutput

You could also add the line:

text/html;                      elinks %s; nametemplate=%s.html`

The latter line opens HTML attachments in elinks.

Then just hit “V” when viewing an email, and you will see the attachments, select the attachment and hit Enter to view it. Awesome :)

Fortunately it seems XPS is supported in Okular under KDE4 (which we don’t have yet), and can also be readily converted to PDF using the Ghostscript “gxps” tool. This has to be built from source, but proved relatively simple. As our users do not have access to the command line, I also had to also create a Konqueror service menu, to enable right-click Action “Convert XPS to PDF”.

I am pleased to say it all works beautifully, and I have typed up my instructions for Debian Lenny here:

• [Howto

  Convert XPS to PDF](/2013/03/12/convert-xps-to-pdf/)

We often use pdftk for command line pdf, but I hadn’t delved deeply into the features. But using pdftk all I had to do was:

$ pdftk A=main.pdf B=2nd.pdf C=3rd.pdf cat A1-24 B A25 C output final.pdf

In other words the final document (final.pdf) is pages 1-24 of document A (main.pdf), the whole of document B (2nd.pdf), page 25 of document A (main.pdf) and the whole of document C (3rd.pdf).

For a command line program, I think that is stunningly intuitive. And best of all it was instantaneous and there was no loss of quality.

pdftk can seemingly do just about anything with pdfs, including encrypt, decrypt, repair, burst and rotate.

pdftk is installable from the Debian repos and typing pdftk --help gives you a handy set of usage examples, so that you don’t have to re-learn it every time you use it.