PDF Arranger
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
PDF Arranger is a free and open-source graphical application for manipulating PDF documents. It allows users to merge, split, rotate, crop, and rearrange pages of PDF files through an interactive interface. Written in Python using the GTK 3 toolkit, it serves as a frontend for the pikepdf library and is available for Linux, Windows, macOS, and FreeBSD.[2] PDF Arranger is a fork of the abandoned PDF-Shuffler project.[2][3]
| PDF Arranger | |
|---|---|
| Developers | Jérôme Robert, kbengs, community contributors |
| Initial release | 26 November 2018 |
| Stable release | |
| Written in | Python (PyGObject) |
| Operating system | Linux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD |
| Type | PDF manipulation tool |
| License | GPL-3.0-or-later |
| Website | github |
| Repository | github |
History
PDF-Shuffler
PDF-Shuffler was created by Konstantinos Poulios in 2008 as a simple PyGTK utility for merging, splitting, and rearranging PDF documents.[4] It was hosted on GNU Savannah and SourceForge, and used Python 2, GTK 2, and the PyPDF library as its PDF backend. The last release of PDF-Shuffler, version 0.6.0, was published on 28 April 2012, after which the project became inactive.[5]
Fork and development
In 2018, Jérôme Robert forked PDF-Shuffler under the name PDF Arranger, describing it as "a humble attempt to make the project a bit more active".[2] The first release, version 1.0, appeared on 26 November 2018.[6][7] The fork modernised the codebase by porting it to Python 3 and GTK 3. Major Linux distributions subsequently replaced PDF-Shuffler with PDF Arranger in their repositories, including Debian,[8] Fedora,[9] and Arch Linux.[10] In January 2020, version 1.4.0 replaced the PyPDF2 backend with pikepdf, which provides Python bindings for the qpdf C++ library.[11][12]
In April 2020, version 1.5.0 introduced a redesigned user interface based on GNOME header bars[13][14] and the application became available on Flathub.[15]
Subsequent releases continued to expand functionality. Version 1.7.0[16] (January 2021) added features such as encrypted PDF support,[17] Version 1.8.0[18] (November 2021) introduced booklet generation.[19] Version 1.11.0[20] (June 2024) added preservation of PDF outlines and hyperlinks — a long-requested feature[21] — and the project published its first official user manual.[22] Version 1.13.0[23] (February 2026) added text search within PDF documents.[24]
Features
PDF Arranger provides the following capabilities:[2][25][22]
- Merging multiple PDF files into a single document
- Splitting PDF documents by extracting selected pages
- Rearranging pages via drag-and-drop
- Rotating pages in 90-degree increments
- Cropping pages, including automatic white border removal
- Inserting blank pages
- Importing images (including JPEG, PNG, TIFF and other formats) via the img2pdf library[26]
- Editing PDF metadata (title, author, keywords, subject)
- Overlaying or underlaying pages with resizing[27]
- Exporting to PNG, JPEG, or rasterised PDF[28]
- Booklet generation and splitting
- Text search within PDF documents[24]
- Preservation of outlines and hyperlinks[21]
- Support for encrypted PDF files
- Undo/redo functionality
- Customisation of keyboard shortcuts by editing a configuration file
- Over 40 language translations
