Today, I was looking for a way to extract pages from a pdf file with the command line interface and stumbled on this answer on , and so I decided to try PDFtk. After a quick installation (apt-get install pdftk), I simply reproduced the example in the answer with my file!

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$ pdftk book.pdf cat 34-45 output chapter2.pdf

Very handy, quite easy to use and efficient! Digging a little more the documentation, it turns out that you can do way more! For instance, with the same cat options, you can actually create assemblages of different PDF files with specific range of pages and specific orientations, for instance :

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pdftk A=book1.pdf B=book2.pdf cat A1-5oddsouth B2-4even output out.pdf

This single command line:

1. take the 2 pdf book1.pdf and book2.pdf files as inputs;
2. take the pages from 1 to 5 that have an even number (so 1, 3 and 5) of the first pdf and turn them upside down (south);
3. take even pages from 2 to 4 (so 2 and 4) from the second file;
4. combine them in out.pdf.

Pretty sweet 😄!