The PDF format has forced its way into being the platform-independent display format for clean-looking documents. Yet the 20-year-old file format also has a serious disadvantage: It's primarily a viewing and printout format and is not very useful for editing.

That means conventional editing programs have a difficult time, for example, extracting parts of the many magazines that exist in PDF format on the Internet to archive them. Even combining PDF files is a chore.

One remedy is the little Linux tool called PDF-Shuffler, which allows you to adapt PDF documents to your needs.

Installation

PDF-Shuffler now exists in the repositories of most of the larger distributions, but if your distribution still doesn't have it, you can get the source code online [1]. After installation via the Software Center, you'll find the program by typing PDF in Ubuntu's HUD. The software requires few resources and works quickly, even with its graphical interface.

Usage

After starting PDF-Shuffler, you get a blank window. All you have at the top is a small horizontal menu bar and buttons underneath it. Using the + button or the File | Add menu, you open a dialog where you can select the PDF document to work on. After bringing the document into the program window, the application generates scaled-down thumbnails of each page and displays them as a list (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The thumbnail view gives you the bigger picture.

If the thumbnails are too small for you to identify the page content or you don't get enough pages on the screen, you can use View | Zoom in or View | Zoom out . To get this to work even faster, simply click on the + or - icons in the button bar.

Tailoring

To remove single pages from the loaded document, you can select noncontiguous ones with your mouse with the Ctrl key pressed. Then, either click the red cross icon on the button bar or press Delete to remove the pages (Figure 2). You can then save your modified document using the disk icon or the File | Save as menu item to save it under a different name.

Figure 2: PDF-Shuffler lets you delete noncontiguous pages.

Rotating

Documents that contain, for example, horizontal tables rotated in portrait view may especially need a format change to make them readable. Although a printed document can simply be turned 90 degrees, viewing the pages on the screen or with a projector requires considerably more effort.

In PDF-Shuffler, you simply select the pages to be modified and use Edit | Rotate right or Edit | Rotate left . This action rotates the pages so you don't have to twist your neck looking at tables. Of course, you can save the document in that form to your hard drive.

Cropping

Occasionally, you might want to get rid of some distracting advertising on a page. PDF-Shuffler has the Cropping function for this. First, select the page and then with a right-click choose Crop… . The software opens a window where you can specify integer percent values to crop for each page edge.

PDF-Shuffler immediately renders the results visually so you can see just how much was cropped. To modify the percentage value, you can simply call up Crop… again and correct things in a matter of seconds (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Unnecessary content can be cut off with the crop function.

Combining

Naturally, PDF-Shuffler also provides the option of merging several PDFs into one. Load the selected files into program window and give the merged documents a single filename.

Moving and Duplicating

PDF-Shuffler can help you reorder the pages in a document by dragging and dropping, although only with full pages. You simply select pages that need copying while pressing Ctrl and then drop the copies into another location.

Of course, you can also move and copy pages simultaneously without having to save the document each time (Figure 4).

Figure 4: The original document from Figure 1 has its pages reordered by dragging and dropping.

Conclusion

PDF-Shuffler allows easy and fast page-by-page editing of PDF files. It works reliably and quickly even with large PDF documents thanks to its light footprint. The intuitive operation and the lack of extensive menus let you get started right away.

The software is ideal for users who want to cut out magazine articles and reassemble them as desired. You can also use the cropping tool to remove page elements you're not interested in. The software is primarily for users who don't need to make text changes to PDF documents but want to reformat them for readability.