postscript, pdf tools command line linux

from:  http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~rennie/ps_notes.html

Central to all PostScript and PDF manipulations is the program GhostScript. This interprets files in any of these formats, and it can then output the document or image after applying various operations: rotation, scaling, cropping, and rasterization. GhostScript is rather user-hostile. Fortunately there are various less hostile wrapper programs, which shield users from GhostScript. The most important one is

gv            displays ps, eps or pdf files

display       displays, manipulates and converts image files

Gnome and KDE have their own variants of gv.
Other utilities, specific to .ps and .eps, are:

psbook        rearrange pages in PostScript file into signatures

psselect      selects pages from a PostScript file

pstops        Ghostscript's PostScript distiller for PS and EPS

epsffit       fit encapsulated PostScript file (EPSF) into constrained size

ps2epsi       embeds a thumbnail image within a PS or EPS file

psnup         multiple pages per sheet

psresize      multiple pages per sheet

psmerge       filter to merge several PostScript files into one

ps2ps         optimizer for PS files

eps2eps       optimizer for EPS files

ps2ascii      extract text from PS file

ps2pdf        translator from PS to PDF

fig2ps        translator from FIG, via Latex, to PS/EPS

Utilities specific to .pdf are:

pdf2ps        translator from PDF to PS

pdfimages     extracts images from PDF documents

pdftotext     extracts text from PDF documents

pdftops       converts PDF to PS

pdftopbm      converts each page to a PBM image

pdftoppm      converts each page to a PPM image

pdfcrop       reduces/increases margins