This blog post is mainly for myself but if it helps you, great. In general, three pesky pdf manipulations I find myself involved with are:

ocr-ing documents
combining documents fast
extracting pages from documents

Homebrew - terminal

I’m just assuming you are on a Mac of sorts and have access to the terminal. My favorite terminal implementation is iterm2. You can customize it by googling for a guide. Here’s a good one.

Make sure you also install Homebrew, the easy package manager. Just copy the install homebrew code in the terminal.

Three main functions: installing, updating, removing.

For installation, just copy the install function of a package. For this post’s packages those are qpdf and ocrmypdf.

brew install qpdf
brew install ocrmypdf

Most packages will be some sort of interface to the real package, those are called ‘casks’. For example, a lightweight pdf reader I like using is called skim. It’s install command is

brew install --cask skim

After a while you want to maybe update (every so often). That command is simply

brew upgrade

To remove packages, just

brew uninstall <packagename>
brew uninstall --cask <packagename>

Great, now we have qpdf, ocrmypdf and maybe skim. Next, step, navigate to the folder where your document is located (must be absolute path).

cd PATH/TO/FOLDER/JUST/COPY/THIS

You can check the files with the ls function.

ls

OCR-ing text

Very easy, the basic command is on the left. I often find I have to redo suboptimal previous ocr-ing, so that is where the force argument comes from.

ocrmypdft inputdocument.pdf outputdocument.pdf --force-ocr

Bam, presto!

Selecting pages from a file

You can clip page ranges, e.g., pages 1-3, or just single pages, e.g. 1, or a combination. Note: these pages are the actual pages of the document, not the internal numbering.

qpdf input.pdf --pages . 1-3 -- result.pdf

Combining files

To combine, we make use of similar syntax. Here we combine the first page from file1.pdf with the second-third and seventh page of file2.pdf

qpdf --empty --pages file1.pdf 1 file2.pdf 1-3,7 -- result.pdf