qpdf

qpdf

structural, content-preserving PDF transformation

curl -fsSL https://unflab.app/get | sh -s -- qpdf

Installs to ~/.local/bin. Add --prefix /usr/local/bin to
put it somewhere else, or --uninstall to remove it.

Why it’s here

Escapes a dependency tree: Homebrew’s build pulls in libraries this tool never touches at run time.

Details

Built from that exact tarball, with its SHA-256 pinned in the
recipe. The binary links against nothing outside /usr/lib
and /System/, checked in CI before release.

qpdf transforms PDF files while preserving their content. It is not a
renderer, a text extractor or an editor — it works on PDF structure:
splitting, merging, rotating, linearising, encrypting, decrypting, and
converting between compressed and human-readable forms.

# Split every page into its own file
qpdf --split-pages in.pdf out.pdf

# Merge, and take pages 1-3 from one file and all of another
qpdf --empty --pages a.pdf 1-3 b.pdf -- merged.pdf

# Remove a password you know
qpdf --decrypt --password=secret locked.pdf open.pdf

# Rotate page 2 by 90 degrees
qpdf --rotate=+90:2 in.pdf out.pdf

# Linearise ("optimise for web") so a viewer can start on page 1
qpdf --linearize in.pdf out.pdf

# Inspect structure: uncompress streams into readable form
qpdf --qdf --object-streams=disable in.pdf readable.pdf

# Check a file for damage
qpdf --check suspect.pdf

man qpdf is thorough, and qpdf --help=topics is a good way in.

Install

./install.sh                      # into ~/.local/bin
./install.sh --prefix /usr/local/bin
./install.sh --uninstall

Shell completions

Completions for zsh and bash are installed to each shell’s conventional
directory. Nothing is sourced and no rc file is edited, so whether they
take effect depends on your shell already looking there:

• bash — ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions, found
  automatically by bash-completion 2.x.

• zsh — ~/.local/share/zsh/site-functions, which is not in the
  default fpath. Add it in ~/.zshrc, above the line that runs
  compinit:

  fpath=(~/.local/share/zsh/site-functions $fpath)
  autoload -Uz compinit && compinit
  

  Appending to fpath after compinit has run silently does nothing —
  that is the mistake people actually make.

About this build

brew install qpdf pulls in jpeg-turbo and openssl@3 (which
brings ca-certificates with it) — three formulae, and an OpenSSL on
your machine that then needs keeping current for its own sake.

This package needs none of them at runtime. qpdf ships its own native
crypto provider, covering the RC4, AES and SHA-2 that PDF encryption
actually uses, so OpenSSL is a build-time default rather than a
requirement; this build selects the native provider and drops it
entirely. libjpeg is genuinely needed and is compiled from source and
linked statically, and zlib comes from macOS itself.

The result depends on nothing outside /usr/lib and /System/.
Encrypted PDFs, JPEG-encoded images and compressed streams all work as
they normally would — nothing is given up for this.

Three binaries ship together, all from the same build and each with its
own man page:

• qpdf — the tool.
• fix-qdf — repairs a QDF file’s cross-reference data after you
  have hand-edited it. QDF mode is qpdf’s readable-PDF format, and this
  is what makes editing one practical.
• zlib-flate — raw zlib compression and decompression, the
  encoding PDF streams use.