Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files

Summary

Project documentation: pdfly.readthedocs.io pdfly is the youngest project of the py-pdf organization. It has been created by Martin Thoma in 2022. It's simply a CLI tool to manipulate PDF files, written in Python and based on the fpdf2 & pypdf libraries. I'm a maintainer of the project 🙂 What can … Project documentation: pdfly.readthedocs.io pdfly is the youngest project of the py-pdf organization. It has been created by Martin Thoma in 2022. It's simply a CLI tool to manipulate PDF files, written in Python and based on the fpdf2 & pypdf libraries. I'm a maintainer of the project 🙂 What can it do? It has meany features, including: $ pdfly meta minimal-document.pdf Operating System Data ┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓ ┃ Attribute ┃ Value ┃ ┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩ │ File Name │ /tmp/minimal-document.pdf │ │ File Permissions │ -rw-r--r-- │ │ File Size │ 16,978 bytes │ │ Creation Time │ 2025-10-13 09:44:32 │ │ Modification Time │ 2025-10-13 09:44:32 │ │ Access Time │ 2025-10-13 09:44:46 │ └───────────────────┴───────────────────────────┘ PDF Data ┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓ ┃ Attribute ┃ Value ┃ ┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩ │ CreationDate │ 2022-04-03 18:05:42+02:00 │ │ Creator │ TeX │ │ Producer │ pdfTeX-1.40.23 │ │ Pages │ 1 │ │ Encrypted │ None │ │ PDF File Version │ %PDF-1.5 │ │ Page Layout │ │ │ Page Mode │ │ │ PDF ID │ ID1=b'q\x96\xc3\xe3U\xc1|\x9fS\xba\x9a\r\xcap\xcd\xd0' │ │ │ ID2=b'q\x96\xc3\xe3U\xc1|\x9fS\xba\x9a\r\xcap\xcd\xd0' │ │ Fonts (embedded) │ │ │ Fonts (embedded) │ /KNEUFH+CMR10 │ │ Attachments │ [] │ │ Images │ 0 images (0 bytes) │ └────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ pdfly can also combine files into new PDF documents: it can extract specific pages & merge documents (pdfly cat); selectively remove pages (pdfly rm); convert images to PDF documents (pdfly x2p...