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.pdfThank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
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This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Pluralistic: AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit (11 Mar 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Articles from blogs I follow around the net
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via Carlos Becker March 25, 2026Code as a Tool of Process
Steve Krouse wrote a piece that has me nodding along: Programming, like writing, is an activity, where one iteratively sharpens what they're doing as they do it. (You wouldn't believe how many drafts I've written of this essay.) There’s an incre…
via Jim Nielsen’s Blog March 24, 2026Paris's Bicycle Mayor and the Hormuz Shock
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via High Speed March 24, 2026Generated by openring