Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files

4 weeks ago 7

Project documentation: pdfly.readthedocs.io

pdfly is the youngest project of the py-pdf organization. It has been created by Martin Thoma in 2022.

It's simply a CLI tool to manipulate PDF files, written in Python and based on the fpdf2 & pypdf libraries.

I'm a maintainer of the project 🙂

What can it do?

It has meany features, including:

display PDF metadata using pdfly meta and pdfly pagemeta commands. Example:

$ pdfly meta minimal-document.pdf Operating System Data ┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓ ┃ Attribute ┃ Value ┃ ┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩ │ File Name │ /tmp/minimal-document.pdf │ │ File Permissions │ -rw-r--r-- │ │ File Size │ 16,978 bytes │ │ Creation Time │ 2025-10-13 09:44:32 │ │ Modification Time │ 2025-10-13 09:44:32 │ │ Access Time │ 2025-10-13 09:44:46 │ └───────────────────┴───────────────────────────┘ PDF Data ┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓ ┃ Attribute ┃ Value ┃ ┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩ │ CreationDate │ 2022-04-03 18:05:42+02:00 │ │ Creator │ TeX │ │ Producer │ pdfTeX-1.40.23 │ │ Pages │ 1 │ │ Encrypted │ None │ │ PDF File Version │ %PDF-1.5 │ │ Page Layout │ │ │ Page Mode │ │ │ PDF ID │ ID1=b'q\x96\xc3\xe3U\xc1|\x9fS\xba\x9a\r\xcap\xcd\xd0' │ │ │ ID2=b'q\x96\xc3\xe3U\xc1|\x9fS\xba\x9a\r\xcap\xcd\xd0' │ │ Fonts (embedded) │ │ │ Fonts (embedded) │ /KNEUFH+CMR10 │ │ Attachments │ [] │ │ Images │ 0 images (0 bytes) │ └────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

pdfly can also combine files into new PDF documents: it can extract specific pages & merge documents (pdfly cat); selectively remove pages (pdfly rm); convert images to PDF documents (pdfly x2pdf); and even compress documents (pdfly compress) or build booklets (pdfly 2-up & pdfly booklet).
pdfly includes some commands to pull out specific content from PDF files: pdfly extract-images & pdfly extract-annotated-text.
sometimes you want to edit a PDF file manually, in a text editor. But when you do so, you break its xref table, that is an index of byte offsets in the document. pdfly update-offsets is there to save the day, fixing manually-edited PDF documents, so that they can be opened in a PDF viewer again!

Release 0.5.0 & new features

Today we released a new version: pdfly release 0.5.0.

Thanks to several contributors, including developers taking part in Hacktoberfest, new exciting features have been added:

pdfly sign allows you to easily sign PDF documents, while pdfly check-sign makes it easy to check a PDF document signature. Thanks to @moormaster for implementing this in PRs #165 & #166 👍🙏.
pdfly extract-annotated-pages extract only annotated pages from a PDF, hence helping to review or rework pages from a large document iteratively. Thanks to Hal Wine (@hwine) for implementing this in PR #128 👍🙏.
pdfly rotate rotate specific pages of a document. Thanks to Subhajit Sahu (@wolfram77) for implementing this in PR #98 👍🙏.

What's next?

We have a bunch of feature ideas: up-for-grabs issues, including some good first issues aimed specially at new contributors, that are willing to help but new to open-source.

Personally, I think the pdfly sign & check-sign could become handy to many end-users, and I think we should continue to extend those commands usage options, as described in issue #71.

We would also be happy to get your feedbacks, bug reports & feature suggestions! 🙂

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