Project documentation: pdfly.readthedocs.io pdfly is the youngest project of the py-pdf organization. It has been created by Martin Thoma in 2022. It's simply a CLI tool to manipulate PDF files, written in Python and based on the fpdf2 & pypdf libraries. I'm a maintainer of the project 🙂 What can …
Project documentation: pdfly.readthedocs.io
pdfly is the youngest project of the py-pdf organization. It has been created by Martin Thoma in 2022.
It's simply a CLI tool to manipulate PDF files, written in Python and based on the fpdf2 & pypdf libraries.
I'm a maintainer of the project 🙂
What can it do?
It has meany features, including:
display PDF metadata using pdfly meta and pdfly pagemeta commands. Example:
$ pdfly meta minimal-document.pdf Operating System Data ┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓ ┃ Attribute ┃ Value ┃ ┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩ │ File Name │ /tmp/minimal-document.pdf │ │ File Permissions │ -rw-r--r-- │ │ File Size │ 16 ,978 bytes │ │ Creation Time │ 2025 -10-13 09 :44:32 │ │ Modification Time │ 2025 -10-13 09 :44:32 │ │ Access Time │ 2025 -10-13 09 :44:46 │ └───────────────────┴───────────────────────────┘ PDF Data ┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓ ┃ Attribute ┃ Value ┃ ┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩ │ CreationDate │ 2022 -04-03 18 :05:42+02:00 │ │ Creator │ TeX │ │ Producer │ pdfTeX-1.40.23 │ │ Pages │ 1 │ │ Encrypted │ None │ │ PDF File Version │ %PDF-1.5 │ │ Page Layout │ │ │ Page Mode │ │ │ PDF ID │ ID1 = b 'q\x96\xc3\xe3U\xc1|\x9fS\xba\x9a\r\xcap\xcd\xd0' │ │ │ ID2 = b 'q\x96\xc3\xe3U\xc1|\x9fS\xba\x9a\r\xcap\xcd\xd0' │ │ Fonts ( embedded ) │ │ │ Fonts ( embedded ) │ /KNEUFH+CMR10 │ │ Attachments │ [] │ │ Images │ 0 images ( 0 bytes ) │ └────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
pdfly can also combine files into new PDF documents: it can extract specific pages & merge documents ( pdfly cat ); selectively remove pages ( pdfly rm ); convert images to PDF documents ( pdfly x2pdf ); and even compress documents ( pdfly compress ) or build booklets ( pdfly 2-up & pdfly booklet ).
pdfly includes some commands to pull out specific content from PDF files : pdfly extract-images & pdfly extract-annotated-text .
sometimes you want to edit a PDF file manually, in a text editor. But when you do so, you break its xref table, that is an index of byte offsets in the document. pdfly update-offsets is there to save the day, fixing manually-edited PDF documents, so that they can be opened in a PDF viewer again!
Release 0.5.0 & new features
Today we released a new version: pdfly release 0.5.0 .
Thanks to several contributors, including developers taking part in Hacktoberfest, new exciting features have been added:
What's next?
We have a bunch of feature ideas: up-for-grabs issues, including some good first issues aimed specially at new contributors, that are willing to help but new to open-source.
Personally, I think the pdfly sign & check-sign could become handy to many end-users, and I think we should continue to extend those commands usage options, as described in issue #71.
We would also be happy to get your feedbacks, bug reports & feature suggestions! 🙂