Managing pdf files is relatively easy in Linux. It does not take too much imagination. Linux comes pre-packaged with easy to use commands for managing your pdf files. By managing here I mean splitting or merging or coverting from docx to pdf. These are what we shall cover.

Merging pdf files

pdftk is a free command-line tool used to split or merge pdf files in linux.

Use apt package manager to install it.

sudo apt-get install pdftk

Then, to merge two or more pdf files, use the command below.

pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf ... cat outfile.pdf

Another tool for merging pdf files is called poppler. This is a free PDF rendering library.

Install it as follows.

sudo apt-get install poppler-utils

Using it is as simple as executing a command such as the one below.

pdf-unite file1.pdf file2.pdf ... outfile.pdf

Converting docx files to pdf

Linux comes with a command called lowriter that is used to convert files form docx to pdf format. This command is part of the libreoffice suite so there is no need to install anything.

To use it, execute:

lowriter --convert-to pdf x.docx