Editing PDFs With qpdf

In my recent survey of tools for working with PDF files, qpdf stood out. It not only extracts information from PDFs, but can convert a PDF to an editable form, and then reconstitute a new PDF after edits.

Do you want to remove images from a PDF? Use qpdf to convert the PDF to json, identify and remove images with jq, and convert from json back to PDF. Scripting alterations to PDFs is easy in this setting.

One thing qpdf does not do is interpret PDFs. That’s a job for a tool like PDFBox. These two tools complement one another well.