How to find and replace text in a existing PDF file with PDFTK (or other command line application)

bash pdf pdftk
Roger picture Roger · Mar 26, 2012 · Viewed 28.5k times · Source

I have on each page of my PDF document a line with this string:

%REPLACE%

Which I'd like to find and replace with another string.

Does anyone know how to do this with some command line application such as PDFTK?

This folk gave me an important clue however I'd like something more direct.

Thanks.

Answer

Dingo picture Dingo · Mar 26, 2012

You can try to modify content of your PDF as follows

  1. Uncompress the text streams of PDF

    pdftk file.pdf output uncompressed.pdf uncompress

  2. Use sed to replace your text with another

    sed -e "s/ORIGINALSTRING/NEWSTRING/g" <uncompressed.pdf >modified.pdf

  3. If this attempt was successful, re-compress the PDF with pdftk

    pdftk modified.pdf output recompressed.pdf compress

Note: This way is not successful every time, mainly due to font subsetting

Related questions

How can I convert a series of images to a PDF from the command line on linux?

I have a scanning server I wrote in cgi/bash and want to be able to convert a bunch of images (all in one folder) to a pdf from the command line. How can that be done?

Read More
Convert PDF to DOC (Python/Bash)

I've saw some pages that allow user to upload PDF and returns a DOC file, like PdfToWord Is there any way to convert a PDF file to a DOC/DOCX file using Python or any Unix command ? Thanks in advance

Read More
Texmaker not updating the PDF viewer

I created bash file which constantly compiles the my latex file, the problem is though that the PDFviewer in texmaker doesn't update, eventhoug the raw PDF file is updated. How come is does the PDFviewer keep showing the old PDF …

Read More