[CentOS] get pdftk into (or from) a repo

[Barry Brimer]

On Thu, 11 May 2017, ken wrote:

> On 05/11/2017 07:07 PM, ken wrote:
>> On 05/11/2017 06:49 PM, Leon Fauster wrote:
>>>> Am 11.05.2017 um 22:26 schrieb ken <gebser at mousecar.com>:
>>>> 
>>>> pdftk used to be in a repo... or maybe it still is, but I don't know 
>>>> which one.  Anyone know?
>>>> 
>>> an old one is in the "dead" rpmforge repo.
>>> 
>> 
>> At https://www.pdflabs.com/docs/install-pdftk-on-redhat-or-centos/ they 
>> have version 2.0 in rpm for RH/Cent5 & 6, but not 7, but there's also 
>> RH-friendly source code.  So it wouldn't be too much head-scratching to get 
>> rpms on a repo.
>
> It's worth mentioning that this is a really nice utility for manipulating 
> PDFs, taking them apart, rearranging them, putting pages together, and a 
> whole lot more.  I've used it hundreds of times.  Probably anyone who has to 
> work with PDFs would have need of it.

I don't remember where, but I read a discussion about a library used in 
pdftk that was a problem in RHEL/CentOS 7. It seems that qpdf does many, 
if not more of the same things and is part of CentOS, no additional repo 
required. Here is the text from the description of the qpdf repo:

QPDF is a command-line program that does structural, content-preserving
transformations on PDF files. It could have been called something
like pdf-to-pdf. It includes support for merging and splitting PDFs
and to manipulate the list of pages in a PDF file. It is not a PDF viewer
or a program capable of converting PDF into other formats.

Naturally the syntax is different, but the times that I've needed it, qdf 
has been fine.

Barry