/morph

Advanced Features Guide

Purpose: Use this reference when the task includes archival, signatures, watermarks, PDF manipulation, encryption, metadata control, or compression.

Contents

• PDF/A
• Digital signatures
• Watermarks
• Merge and split
• Bookmarks and TOC
• Page manipulation
• Encryption and metadata
• Compression

PDF/A

# Create PDF then convert to PDF/A-2b
pandoc input.md -o temp.pdf --pdf-engine=xelatex
gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output-pdfa.pdf temp.pdf
verapdf --flavour 2b output-pdfa.pdf

Digital Signatures

Rules:

• Ask first for signing requirements.
• Prefer dedicated signing tools.
• pdfsig is primarily for verification.

pdfsig input.pdf
pdfsig -v signed.pdf

Watermarks

pdftk input.pdf stamp watermark.pdf output output-watermarked.pdf

Use watermarking for explicit draft or distribution control only when requested or policy-backed.

Merge And Split

# Merge
pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf cat output merged.pdf
pdfunite file1.pdf file2.pdf merged.pdf

# Split
pdftk input.pdf burst output page_%02d.pdf
pdfseparate input.pdf page_%d.pdf

Bookmarks And TOC

# TOC via Pandoc
pandoc input.md -o output.pdf --pdf-engine=xelatex --toc

# Inject bookmark info
pdftk input.pdf update_info bookmarks.txt output output-with-bookmarks.pdf

Page Manipulation

# Rotate
pdftk input.pdf rotate 1-endright output rotated.pdf

# Reorder
pdftk input.pdf cat 3 1 2 5 4 output reordered.pdf

# Resize to A4
gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=a4-output.pdf input.pdf

Encryption And Metadata

# Password protection
pdftk input.pdf output protected.pdf owner_pw "owner_password" user_pw "user_password"

# 256-bit AES encryption
qpdf --encrypt "user_pw" "owner_pw" 256 -- input.pdf encrypted.pdf

# Metadata
pdfinfo input.pdf
pdftk input.pdf dump_data
exiftool input.pdf

Rules:

• Ask first for encryption, password, or signature workflows.
• Do not invent security settings or passwords.

Compression

# Compress
gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=compressed.pdf input.pdf

# Linearize
qpdf --linearize input.pdf linearized.pdf