PDFtools

PDFtools is a software toolkit for working with PDF documents. It provides both command-line utilities and a programmable API intended for integration into other software projects as well as for direct interactive use. The toolkit emphasizes accuracy in preserving layout and text content while enabling a wide range of document manipulations across major operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Key features include merging and splitting PDFs, reordering, rotating, and deleting pages; extracting or replacing content; compressing and optimizing file size; editing metadata and document properties; applying and removing password protection and permissions; handling form fields (filling, flattening, and exporting); annotating and removing annotations; and converting between PDF and other formats or images in supported configurations. OCR support and text extraction facilities are typically available through optional components or integrations with external engines. The API is designed to be accessible from multiple programming languages, with bindings available for languages such as C, C++, Python, and Java, enabling developers to embed PDFtools capabilities in applications.

PDFtools is maintained by an international community of contributors and is distributed with documentation that covers installation, usage, and API references. It is used by individuals, librarians, publishers, and software developers who need reliable programmatic access to PDF processing tasks.