Developer(s) Andrea Vacondio | Development status Active | |
Initial release August 9, 2007 (2007-08-09) Stable release 3.2.5 / December 14, 2016; 3 months ago (2016-12-14) Preview release 3.0.0.M2 / October 4, 2015; 17 months ago (2015-10-04) --> Repository github.com/torakiki/pdfsam | ||
PDFSaM or PDF Split and Merge software is a free and open source cross-platform set of tools for manipulating PDF documents. PDFSaM basically provides a command-line and graphical user interfaces to the iText library. The command-line interface is written in Java and dual-licensed under the GPLv2 and LGPLv2. In graphical mode there is a separate utility for each kind of task; these utilities serve as plugins to the main GUI and call the command-line tool for doing the actual work. The main GUI and its plugins are written in Java Swing and licensed solely under the GPLv2.
Contents
Thus PDFSaM needs just a working Java Virtual Machine installed in the operating system in order to run.
The distribution system
PDFSaM comes in two different versions.
The basic version is a simple desktop utility for the most common PDF manipulating tasks. It is freely accessible from the project's page both as source and compiled code. There are MSI packages for 32-bit and 64-bit MS Windows, .dmg for Mac OS X and ZIP bundle for the power users' convenience. ZIP bundle comes especially handy for use on the GNU/Linux platform: only a few GNU/Linux distributions have a PDFSaM package in their repositories, namely Debian, Ubuntu and Arch Linux (as for April 2013).
The enhanced version is actually the full version of the program, including some experimental features. It comes in 3 different purchasing options, with varying features for each. Up until version 3 of PDFSam, the source code was available from the project's SourceForge page under the GPL, but the author of the software did not openly distribute the enhanced version's ready-made packages. In order to set up a working environment one had to either compile this version from source, or make a donation to the project (thus gaining access to the support forum and the compiled packages of the enhanced version). Currently, version 3 is not open sourced, and the only option to use it, is to buy it. Older version's (ie 2.2.4e and lower) source code is still available at the project's SourceForge page.
Functionality
PDFSaM has no capabilities of editing the PDF document content. It just manipulates the pages, and the whole document's attributes. It can also extract attachments from a PDF file.
The output PDF files produced by the PDFSaM 2.2.4 may be in the PDF versions 1.5 through 1.7.
Basic version
The basic version provides a subset of the program's functionality. It can:
Enhanced version
Compared to the basic version, it provides additional features that allow to: