Built In PDF Magic in Debian

| software | linux | foss |

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:

In order to combine a coverpage with another document we can simple run the following command inside a terminal.
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

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Pluralistic: Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach' (21 Oct 2025)

Today's links Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach': If you didn't laugh, you'd have to cry. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Scary Godmother; Nightvale novel; The war on Worker's Comp; Cadillac's murdermo…

via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow October 21, 2025

10 pointless facts about me

Found on Kev’s blog and originally started by Dave, here are my answers to this fun blog challenge: Do you floss your teeth? Sometimes. I’d say maybe a few times a week? I’m terrible at being consistent, and that includes flossing regularly. Tea, co…

via Manuel Moreale — Everything Feed October 21, 2025

Getting started with simple CSS View Transitions

There's (yet another) new piece of CSS to learn! Hurrah! Way back in 2011, jQuery mobile introduced the web to page-change animations. Clicking on a link would make your high-tech Nokia display a cool page-flip as you navigated from one page of a web…

via Terence Eden’s Blog October 21, 2025

Generated by openring