PDFriend is a simple command-line utility for modifying PDF documents. It was developed primarily to perform imposition, that is, arranging multiple pages of an input document into a single page in the output.
PDFriend requires Java SE 1.8 or later to run. Java is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. You can install Java by going to its website and selecting the version appropriate for your system.
Standalone executable jars are provided at the
releases page.
Download the pdfriend-standalone-*.jar and put it anywhere on your computer.
You can then run the application like any other executable jar:
java -jar pdfriend-standalone.jar [arguments]
You can simplify this by creating a script called pdfriend,
where you call the command above and pass any arguments given
to the script into the command.
If you put the script somewhere in your PATH and make it executable,
you can then invoke pdfriend by simply issuing:
pdfriend [arguments]
An experimental cross-platform installer is available from
the releases page
as the pdfriend-installer-*.jar file.
This installer requires Java to be installed. It will unpack PDFriend
into a directory of your choice.
On Linux, it will also install a shell script and add it to the PATH
for the current user, enabling you to conveniently run PDFriend from
the terminal.
- Apache PDFBox – PDF manipulation
- JCommander – parsing command-line arguments
- Apache Commons – Java components
- Apache Log4J2 – logging and output
- IzPack – providing cross-platform installer
- Singon (Jan Slaný) – Singond
- Special thanks goes to the developers of the Apache PDFBox library, whose work made this application possible.
- Cédric Beust, the developer of JCommander
- the developers of Apache Commons
- the developers of Apache Log4J2
- the developers of IzPack