pdfsam VS pdfcpu

I find pdfsam to be the perfect offline tool for me on Windows.

https://pdfsam.org

And it's open source as well: https://github.com/torakiki/pdfsam

This thread may be relevant.

That might be fit for your purpose PDFSam

*https://pdfsam.org/

use pdfsam.org to split the pdf into individual sheets fyi

PDFsam - merge, split, extract pages, rotate and mix your PDF files

PDF Sam is open source and can handle that https://pdfsam.org/

I have used tools, like PDFsam, to insert, delete, reorder, and rotate pages in existing PDFs. It's a great tool, but it's not a complete PDF editor.

Slightly tangential: if you are hacking on PDFs, manually or otherwise, this is an incredibly useful tool: https://pdfcpu.io/ (not the author, just a user)

A really nice, stand-alone command line tool is pdfcpu.

https://github.com/pdfcpu/pdfcpu

Check it out => https://github.com/pdfcpu/pdfcpu/releases/tag/v0.6.0

I can report that the closest I've came before is with PDFMiner (https://pypi.org/project/pdfminer/) for Python. The benefit of this one is that it retains styling information, so that italics and the like can be retained, at least with some post-processing (I think one might need to convert certain CSS-classes to actual or tags).

The other option I have started looking into is the PDFCPU library for Go. It is a bit more low-level than PDFMiner, but one gets out very well structured info, that seem it might be possible to post-process quite well, for one's particular use case and PDF layouts: https://github.com/pdfcpu/pdfcpu

I also now tried the Marker tool in the OT, and it seems to do a reasonable job. It did intermingle some columns though, at least in some tricky cases such as when there were a round shaped image in between the two columns. One note is that Marker doesn't seem to retain styling like italics though.

Of course, the best way would be to solve it via the API without CLI. But this doesn't seem to work. https://github.com/pdfcpu/pdfcpu/issues/122