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Using pdftk to get all first pages of many pdf's into one pdf document

Hallo all,

I have about 100 randomly named pdfs in a directory and I wish to compile a document consisting of the first page of every one.

I normally use pdftk with a command like this:

pdftk A=first.pdf B=second.pdf C=third.pdf cat A1 B1 C1 output combined_firstpages.pdf

Could you please help me with the correct syntax to get output from

ls *.pdf

into that command? I been trying with the 'read' command which is what I normally use in this kind of circumstance but it just ain't working and I currently feel as if my head is going to explode.

many thanks to anyone who can help sort this.

Adam

Hi

pdftk is not very good for this task. The handles can be only one letter and must be an uppercase letter, so only A-Z is possible.

But it can be done by making a temporary directory, extract page 1 of every PDF into a separate file in that directory, and then join all those PDF files into a big one. Here is a little script that does the job:

Code:

#!/bin/sh



#Set the filename on the line below:

DESTINATION="firstpages.pdf"



#Here is the temporary directory:

tempdir="/tmp/pdfpage1"

mkdir $tempdir

for name in *.pdf ; do

        pdftk "A=$name" cat A1 output "$tempdir/$name"

done

pdftk $tempdir/*.pdf cat output "$DESTINATION"

rm -r $tempdir