Doncha love free software? Have I asked that before?
I had a 91-page PDF document with the pages in backward order. That’s annoying. I tried to use Acrobat (Standard) to reverse the pages, but I’m too dumb to make that work. My best guess after 20 minutes of searching Adobe’s help and the web was to print to PDF with the ‘reverse pages’ turned on. That did not produce a satisfying result.
Then I popped over to Freshmeat to ask that oasis of software goodness for some help. In less time than it took to try the print experiment (it had cranked for a good 15 minutes…), I found pdftk, installed it, learned how to get it do do what I wanted (pdftk manual.pdf cat 91-1 output manual-rev.pdf), did it, got a satisfying result, and mailed the developers a thank you note.
Woot.
6 Comments
Thanks, this was exactly my problem and what I needed to accomplish and worked well for me.
Thank you too, I had the same problem and already knew pdftk, but didn’t know it could do it 🙂
Same as Hotte !
Thank you.
Here’s an even better one. Don’t have a fancy duplex scanner? Scan the fronts, flip the doc over and scan the backs. Now you’ve got two pdfs and you need to merge them to get your scanned document back into a single file.
> pdftk A=fronts.pdf B=backs.pdf shuffle A Bend-1 output document.pdf
(note the pages in the backs.pdf are in reverse order…hence the ‘end-1’)
Note that you can say “end-1” instead of “91-1” if you don’t know how many pages the document has.
More generally,
pdftk input.pdf cat end-1 output reversed.pdfwill do the trick; no need to know the number of pages.