insert a blank page into a PDF using ghostscript or pdftk

Question

I have a PDF file that needs a blank page inserted into it every so often. The pattern is unpredictable, so I need a command that will allow me to fit one in wherever necessary.

Answer 1

From http://blog.chewearn.com/2008/12/18/rearrange-pdf-pages-with-pdftk/

pdftk A=src.pdf B=blank.pdf cat A1 B1 A2-end output res.pdf

Hope you like this script, just save it as pdfInsertBlankPageAt.sh, add execute permissions, and run.

./pdfInsertBlankPageAt 5 src.pdf res.pdf

#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -ne 3 ]
then
  echo "Usage example: ./pdfInsertBlankPageAt 5 src.pdf res.pdf"
  exit $E_BADARGS
else
  pdftk A=$2 B=blank.pdf cat A1-$(($1-1)) B1 A$1-end output $3
fi 

cat A1 B1 A2-end means that the output file will contain the first page of document A (src.pdf) followed by the first page of document B (blank.pdf) followed by the rest (pages 2 to end) of document B. This operation is called concatenation, Linux cat is very often used to display text, but it is interesting when used with more than one argument.