@1dalm >real viable "open source" alternative to Adobe Pro yet?
First of all, GNU/Jihad against "open source" and all other forms of proprietary software!!!!!!

Plenty of free software pdf readers exist, off the top of my head there's: mupdf, poppler, evince, zathura, okular - which all display pdf's with excellent performance unlike "Adobe Acrobat".

It seems that adobe has intentionally sabotaged the pdf format, so only they can write a "convenient" in-place editor, but you giving in and paying the proprietary masters for such functionality makes the problem worse.

I personally just edit pdf's with a hexeditor or GIMP or inkscape if the need arrives.


>software that just allows me to split up and merge PDF documents in a easy to use and light weight GUI.
Why on earth would you want a GUI just to split and merge pdf's?

Poppler comes with the "pdfseparate" program and splitting a pdf is as trivial as:
pdf-split.sh:
#!/bin/bash
pdfseparate $1 "${1%.*}_%d.pdf"

With invocation: ~/scripts/pdf-split.sh <pdf file> each page appears in the current directory postfixed with _<number>.


Merging a pdf is a little bit harder as that format really does not like merging.

GNU ghostscript (https://www.ghostscript.com/) can merge a pdf like so:

pdf-unite.sh:
#!/bin/bash
if [[ $# -eq 0 ]] ; then
echo 'Missing arguments'
exit 0
fi

gs -q -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dAutoRotatePages=/None -dAutoFilterColorImages=false -dAutoFilterGrayImages=false -dColorImageFilter=/FlateEncode -dGrayImageFilter=/FlateEncode \
-dDownsampleMonoImages=false -dDownsampleGrayImages=false -sOutputFile=joined.pdf -dBATCH "$@"

Invocation: ~/scripts/pdf-unite.sh <pdf file 0> <pdf file 1> ...

Last time I checked it couldn't merge all pdf files (but that's probably fixed by now).


With the power of LaTeX and the whole TexLive, you can merge all pdf files:
merge-pdf.sh:
#!/bin/bash
if [[ $# -eq 0 ]] ; then
echo 'Missing arguments'
exit 0
fi

echo "\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}" > merged.tex

for pdf in "$@"; do
echo "\includepdf[pages=-]{$pdf}" >> merged.tex
done

echo "\end{document}" >> merged.tex

pdflatex merged.tex && rm merged.tex




If I wanted to, I could write a GUI on top of GNU Ghostscript that could split and merge pdf files - but GUI's for most computing tasks are a huge waste of time when the shell is faster and easier to use.