Built In PDF Magic in Debian
Debian has some awesome PDF tools built right in via the poppler-utilspackage that I never knew about. In my previous post I talked about how to make beautiful documents with code snippets using various Sublime Text extensions to convert markdown into PDF. One issue that I ran into was getting a cover page created. As far as I know There is really no easy way to make a nice cover page in markdown. Specifically in Github Flavored Markdown (which is what I am using) there is not a good way to make a page break. The easy solution would be to simple write up your entire document in Markdown, and then make a separate cover page. The problem is how to merge these two files together to make one document. Thanks to the built in PDF tools in debian this becomes very simple! The poppler-utils package has the following utilities built in:
- pdfdetach — lists or extracts embedded files (attachments)
- pdffonts — font analyzer
- pdfimages — image extractor
- pdfinfo — document information
- pdfseparate — page extraction tool
- pdftocairo — PDF to PNG/JPEG/PDF/PS/EPS/SVG converter using Cairo
- pdftohtml — PDF to HTML converter
- pdftoppm — PDF to PPM/PNG/JPEG image converter
- pdftops — PDF to PostScript (PS) converter
- pdftotext — text extraction
- pdfunite — document merging tool
pdfunite coverpage.pdf content.pdf final.pdf
This will create a document called final.pdf (of course you should change coverpage.pdf and content.pdf to match your actual files). Warning: be sure to include the final output file or pdfunite will replace the last file that you type will all over the previous files!
Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- 2024
- Reinstalling Windows at 1am
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- How to Disable Wayland in Debian Testing
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- The AGI economy is coming faster than you think from Freethink
- Rolling the ladder up behind us from Xe Iaso's blog
- In Praise of “Normal” Engineers from charity.wtf
- Reports of Bluesky's death have been greatly exaggerated from The Torment Nexus
- What Would a Kubernetes 2.0 Look Like from matduggan.com
- We Can Just Measure Things from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- The Gentle Singularity from Sam Altman
- Whale Watching from https://popagandhi.com/
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Measurement and Numbers
Here’s Jony Ive talking to Patrick Collison about measurement and numbers: People generally want to talk about product attributes that you can measure easily with a number…schedule, costs, speed, weight, anything where you can generally agree that six is a…
via Jim Nielsen’s Blog July 14, 2025The 6 Hours of Lex
When I drive the 24 Hours of Le Mans, I spend a total of about 6-9 hours in the car, divided into stints of roughly two hours at a time. It's intense. But talking with Lex Fridman in Austin on his podcast? Over six hours straight! We only interrupte…
via David Heinemeier Hansson July 14, 2025Don’t publish your podcast only on Spotify
I’ve been coming across small or personal podcasts that can only be heard on Spotify. Intrigued by this phenomenon, I created a new podcast on Spotify Creator platform to find out what’s happening. Spotify, among other services, offers podcast hosting. It…
via Manual do Usuário July 14, 2025Generated by openring