Ubuntu is my preferred operating system. I even use this OS on my work computer. This choice has some minor down sides. Most business software is developed for windows environments. But fortunately most commercial software on windows has an opensource alternative. This is also the case for tools for handling pdf files.

A little line up of tools that I frequently use;

Document Viewer – gui

This is the default pdf viewer on ubuntu 20.04lts. It does the job splendidly.

PDFArranger – gui

This is my go-to tool for merging pdf’s together. rotate or discarding pages.

PDFinfo – commandline

Also a ubuntu standard application. This shows the basic information of the pdf including page dimensions in points and standardized page formats ( A0, LEGAL etc.).

pdfposter – command line

This is a little harder to explain in one sentence. Lets say you want to print a A3. But all you have access to is an A4 printer. With pdfposter you can create a ‘poster’ pdf file according to your requested dimensions.

The command would look like ;

pdfposter -mA4 -pA3 source.pdf destination.pdf

Be sure to set the -p (postersize) otherwise the pdf page dimension is used.

It would be nice if a tool exsisted that would combine PDFArranger, pdfposter and document viewer. Until than, I have to switch between those tools.