Poppler is an open source library and tools to manipulate pdfs.

Pdf manipulating tools in Ubuntu - Poppler

Sometomes you need to add a page to pdf...

Page content

Or another day you want to extract image and text from the pdf…

Above is an AI-generated image by Flux 1 model) of how “spanners are very busy chasing portable documents”.

About Poppler

Poppler is a free and open-source PDF rendering library used in Linux systems, including Ubuntu. It provides command-line utilities for manipulating and converting PDF files. Here’s a summary of Poppler utilities in Ubuntu and how to use them:

What is Poppler in Ubuntu?

Poppler is a PDF rendering library based on the xpdf-3.0 codebase.
It includes multiple command-line tools for extracting text, images, merging/splitting PDFs, and converting PDFs to other formats.
Commonly used in GNOME and KDE desktop environments.

Installation

To install Poppler utilities in Ubuntu, run:

sudo apt-get install poppler-utils

Poppler is a PDF rendering library based on Xpdf PDF viewer.

This package contains command line utilities (based on Poppler) for getting information of PDF documents, convert them to other formats, or manipulate them:

pdfdetach – lists or extracts embedded files (attachments)
pdffonts – font analyzer
pdfimages – image extractor
pdfinfo – document information
pdfseparate – page extraction tool
pdfsig – verifies digital signatures
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

Key Poppler Utilities & Usage

pdfinfo – Get PDF metadata (title, author, pages, etc.)
```
pdfinfo file.pdf
```
pdftotext – Extract text from a PDF
```
pdftotext file.pdf [output.txt]
```
pdfimages – Extract images from a PDF
```
pdfimages file.pdf output_prefix
```
pdftoppm / pdftocairo – Convert PDF pages to images (PNG, JPEG, etc.)
```
pdftoppm -png file.pdf output_prefix
```
pdfseparate – Split a PDF into individual pages
```
pdfseparate file.pdf output_%d.pdf
```

pdfunite – Merge multiple PDFs into one

pdfunite file1.pdf file2.pdf merged.pdf

pdftohtml – Convert PDF to HTML
```
pdftohtml file.pdf [output.html]
```
pdffonts – List fonts used in a PDF
```
pdffonts file.pdf
```

Additional Notes

Most commands support -h or --help for detailed options.
Poppler is preinstalled on many Linux systems, but if missing, poppler-utils can be installed via apt.

Ubuntu Lauchpad Package info

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/poppler

gir1.2-poppler-0.18: GObject introspection data for poppler-glib
libpoppler-cpp-dev: PDF rendering library -- development files (CPP interface)
libpoppler-cpp1: PDF rendering library (CPP shared library)
libpoppler-cpp1-dbgsym: No summary available for libpoppler-cpp1-dbgsym in ubuntu plucky.
libpoppler-dev: PDF rendering library -- development files
libpoppler-glib-dev: PDF rendering library -- development files (GLib interface)
libpoppler-glib-doc: PDF rendering library -- documentation for the GLib interface
libpoppler-glib8t64: PDF rendering library (GLib-based shared library)
libpoppler-glib8t64-dbgsym: debug symbols for libpoppler-glib8t64
libpoppler-private-dev: PDF rendering library -- private development files
libpoppler-qt5-1t64: PDF rendering library (Qt 5 based shared library)
libpoppler-qt5-1t64-dbgsym: debug symbols for libpoppler-qt5-1t64
libpoppler-qt5-dev: PDF rendering library -- development files (Qt 5 interface)
libpoppler-qt6-3t64: PDF rendering library (Qt 6 based shared library)
libpoppler-qt6-3t64-dbgsym: debug symbols for libpoppler-qt6-3t64
libpoppler-qt6-dev: PDF rendering library -- development files (Qt 6 interface)
libpoppler140: PDF rendering library
libpoppler140-dbgsym: debug symbols for libpoppler140
poppler-utils: PDF utilities (based on Poppler)
poppler-utils-dbgsym: debug symbols for poppler-utils