PDF Split and Merge Utility for Ubuntu Linux: PDF Sam

If you deal with a lot of PDF files under Ubuntu and all you want is nothing but to extract certain pages... then you don't need PDF Sam, PDFMod should do it for you. But if you want more control over your PDF documents (meaning both split and merging with advanced features) then PDF Sam is a pretty good utility.

PDF Sam is an open source application written in Java and needs the Java virtual environment to run. It comes with two versions (both open source). One version is completely free (the one that I'm using) but for the commercial version (they called it enhanced version), for that you'll have to pay some fee.

There's no "fee limits", even a single dollar will do it! OR you can download the enhanced versions's source code and compile it for free as well.

Not the best looking GUI... but it gets the job done!...

But the enhanced version has its own features such as the ability to encrypt or decrypt PDF files, add a front-page, etc. But for simple split/merger needs, the free version is more than enough. 

Main features...

*. Split PDF files with following options (few to mention):

Split the source file into single pages, manually define the starting page, split after a certain pages (1/2/ any page numbers) or use bookmarks as split points, change the output file meta data (Acrobat 6/7/8 or use the source meta data), change the output file location, etc.

You can add more than one PDF file to the list.

*. Merge is pretty simple actually.

You just locate/add your files to the list and then change few settings such as the above mentioned meta-data version, destination (enable "PDF documents contain forms" option if needed) and hit the "Run" button.

*. Play alert sounds (don't think it worked in my Ubuntu 11.04 though).

*. Few languages supported.

Although default GUI is pretty darn ugly :D, I changed it using the "Settings" section (you'll have to re-start the app to apply the changes) and after that PDF Sam used the default GTK theme (an older version of the GTK actually) and it looked much nicer afterward.

You can install PDF Sam in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal (perhaps in 10.10 and 10.04) by using the below command in your Terminal window.

sudo apt-get install pdfsam

That's it.