GsPdfUtils

This gem provides some simple pdf utilities based on Ghostscript.

Currently it provides methods for detecting pdf files by magic, counting pdf pages and extracting a single, all or a range of pages from a pdf.

It is less resource hungry and faster than eg. imagemagick for the tasks provided.

It might be much slower than pdftk though, so also look at pdftk_utils.

It's still in alpha state and was freshly extracted from a project and has no spec coverage, still it might suite your needs.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'gs_pdf_utils', :git => "https://github.com/felixbuenemann/gs_pdf_utils"

And then execute:

$ bundle

Due to it's early state, gem is not currently released on rubygems.

Usage

pdf = GsPdfUtils::PdfFile.new "test.pdf"
# get page count
pdf.pages
# extract a page to page1.pdf
pdf.extract_page(1, "page1.pdf")
# extract all pages to separate pdfs (page-1.pdf, page-2.pdf, ...)
pdf.extract_pages("page-%d.pdf")
# extract pages 2 to 5
pdf.extract_page_range(2..5, "page2-5.pdf")
# append test2.pdf and test3.pdf to test.pdf and write to merged.pdf
pdf.append_files "test2.pdf", "test3.pdf", "merged.pdf"
# check if file is a pdf, by checking magic bytes
GsPdfUtils.is_pdf? "test.pdf"

Configuration

If ghostscript is not in your path, you can configure it:

GsPdfUtils.config do |c|
  c.ghostscript_binary = "/path/to/gs"
end

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request