A collection of command line solutions for different PDF‑manipulation use‑cases, such as:

• PDF splitting (“explode” one multi‑page PDF into set of single‑page PDFs)
• cropping PDF pages
• …

• Download: no binary, install via sudo port install mupdf
• Changelog: https://mupdf.com/releases/history
• Manual: https://mupdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

• Download: https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/pdftk_server-2.02-mac_osx-10.6-setup.pkg
• Changelog: https://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-version-history/
• Manual: https://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-man-page/ (examples here)

• Download: https://www.coherentpdf.com/eval.html (fully functional demo)
• Changelog: https://www.coherentpdf.com/cpdfmanual/cpdfmanualap2.html#x26-177000B.1
• Manual: https://www.coherentpdf.com/cpdfmanual/cpdfmanual.html

• Download: https://github.com/pdfcpu/pdfcpu
• Changelog: https://pdfcpu.io/changelog.html
• Manual: https://pdfcpu.io/about/command_set

• QPDF: https://qpdf.sourceforge.io/
• …

Example use‑case: Obvious.

cpdf -squeeze:

cpdf -squeeze "src.pdf" [-squeeze-no-recompress] -o "dst.pdf"

pdfcpu optimize:

pdfcpu optimize "src.pdf" "dst.pdf"

Example use‑case: you have (scanned) pages where each PDF page contains two physical pages, and want to crop those into two.

mutool poster:

mutool poster -x 2 "src.pdf" "dst.pdf"

cpdf -chop:

cpdf -chop "1 2" "src.pdf" -o "dst.pdf"

pdftk shuffle && cpdf -mediabox:

pdftk A=src.pdf shuffle A A output dst.pdf
cpdf -mediabox "0mm 0mm a5landscape" "src.pdf" odd -o "srcOdd.pdf"
cpdf -mediabox "148.5mm 0mm a5landscape" "srcOdd.pdf" even -o "dst.pdf"

The second step might also be done in Adobe Acrobat “Crop pages” function.

See MuPDF documentation on different PDF page boxes (media|crop|art|trim|bleed]box).

cpdf -mediabox (/cropbox/artbox/trimbox/bleedbox):

cpdf -mediabox "0mm 0mm a4portrait" "srcA3.pdf" -o "dstA4.pdf"

Note that Acrobat won't let you crop MediaBox.

1. Go to “Edit PDF” and then “Crop pages” function.

Example use‑case: You have cropped some pages but you want to actually remove the content, since otherwise it is only hidden but remains in PDF – this can be seen when you inspect the PDF in Adobe Acrobat via “Edit PDF” and zoom out the page – the cropped content will be selectable, although not visible, since it is out of the page margins.

mutool trim ‑o “derotateSplit trim.pdf” ‑b cropbox “derotateSplit.pdf”

mutool trim:

mutool trim -o "dst.pdf" -b cropbox "src.pdf"

1. Download custom user script CropBoxFix
2. Import it into Acrobat Preflight (by double‑clicking)
3. Run preflight and the script

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