I'm working on pdftl, a cross-platform PDF manipulation tool that syntax-matches pdftk but leverages the modern Python ecosystem (pikepdf, pypdfium2).

It’s a CLI utility that supports the standard operations (merge, split, stamp, rotate, form fill) and extends them with:

- Chained commands: You can pipeline operations in memory using --- separators.

- Geometry: Actual cropping, chopping (splitting pages into pieces), and scaling.

- Content editing: Regex search/replace on content streams and code injection.

- Modern encryption: supports AES-256 encryption, and PDF signatures (via pyHanko)

- Built in help for every operation: pdftl help cat

It passes the php-pdftk compatibility tests, so it should be a safe drop-in for most legacy workflows. And better compatibility is on the way.

The project is open source (MPL 2.0). I'm looking for people to test this and for any helpful feedback/contributions.

Installation:

  pipx install pdftl[full]