PDFtk Server

PDFtk Server is our command-line tool for working with PDFs. It is commonly used for client-side scripting or server-side processing of PDFs.

It is also used by OEMs and ISVs to give their products the ability to manipulate PDFs. A commercial license is required to distribute PDFtk with your commercial product.

PDFtk Server can:

PDFtk Server does not require Adobe Acrobat or Reader, and it runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Documentation

PDFtk’s features are fully documented on its man page. We also offer some command-line examples.

Downloads

We provide installers for Windows, Mac OS X, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS. Many Linux distributions provide a PDFtk package you can download and install using their package manager.

Microsoft Windows

Click to download the PDFtk Server installer for Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8:

Windows Download

After installation, open a command-prompt, type pdftk and press Enter. Pdftk will respond by displaying brief usage information.

Apple Mac OS X

Click to download PDFtk Server for the Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), 10.7 (Lion) and 10.8 (Mountain Lion):

Mac OS X Download

After installation, open a Terminal, type pdftk and press Return. Pdftk will respond by displaying brief usage information. Access pdftk documenation by running man pdftk.

This installer creates a directory on you Mac: /opt/pdflabs/pdftk/. This will contain a bin directory which holds the pdftk program and a docs directory which holds the complete PDFtk manual.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS

We have RPMs for RHEL and CentOS. We also have a source RPM and instructions for building from source code:

Red Hat & CentOS

PDFtk Server Commercial Support

For commercial product support, please purchase our one-year support agreement. It entitles you to the fastest answers to your questions and the fastest fixes to any problems that arise. Read the full agreement here:

PDFtk Server Support Agreement (PDF)

Now available from our e-commerce site for $79:

Buy PDFtk Server Commercial Support

PDFtk Server Redistribution License

If you plan to distribute PDFtk Server as part of your own software, you will need a PDFtk Server Redistribution License. The exception to this rule is if your software is licensed to the public under the GPL or another compatible license.

Our commercial redistribution license allows you, subject to the terms of the license, to distribute an unlimited number of PDFtk Server binaries as part of one distinct commercial product. Please read the full license:

PDFtk Server Redistribution License (PDF)

Now available from our e-commerce site for $995:

Buy the PDFtk Server Redistribution License

Build PDFtk Server

You can compile PDFtk Server from its source code. PDFtk Server is known to compile and run on Debian, Ubuntu Linux, FreeBSD, Slackware Linux, SuSE, Solaris and HP-UX.

We have built pdftk using gcc/gcj/libgcj versions 3.4.5, 4.4.1, 4.5.0 and 4.6.3. Pdftk 1.4x fails to build on gcc 3.3.5 due to missing libgcj features. If you are using gcc 3.3 or older, try building pdftk 1.12 instead.