nano-pdf — Natural-Language PDF Editing

Use the nano-pdf CLI to perform common PDF operations — merge, split, compress, add watermarks, redact text, and more — via simple natural-language or flag-based commands.

When to Use

• User wants to merge multiple PDFs into one
• User wants to split a PDF into individual pages or page ranges
• User wants to compress a large PDF to reduce file size
• User wants to add a watermark or page numbers to a PDF
• User wants to redact or remove specific pages

How to Use

1. Install nano-pdf

powershell
pip install nano-pdf
# Verify installation
nano-pdf --version

2. Merge multiple PDFs

powershell
nano-pdf merge report1.pdf report2.pdf appendix.pdf --output merged.pdf

3. Split a PDF into individual pages

powershell
# Split every page into a separate file
nano-pdf split document.pdf --output ./pages/

# Split a specific range into a new file
nano-pdf split document.pdf --pages 1-5 --output extract.pdf

4. Compress a PDF

powershell
# Default compression
nano-pdf compress large_file.pdf --output compressed.pdf

# Aggressive compression (lower image quality)
nano-pdf compress large_file.pdf --level high --output compressed.pdf

5. Add a watermark

powershell
nano-pdf watermark input.pdf --text "CONFIDENTIAL" --output watermarked.pdf
# Custom font size and opacity
nano-pdf watermark input.pdf --text "DRAFT" --size 60 --opacity 0.3 --output draft.pdf

6. Add page numbers

powershell
nano-pdf number input.pdf --position bottom-right --output numbered.pdf

7. Remove specific pages

powershell
# Remove pages 3 and 7 from a 10-page PDF
nano-pdf remove input.pdf --pages 3,7 --output trimmed.pdf

8. Rotate pages

powershell
# Rotate all pages 90 degrees clockwise
nano-pdf rotate input.pdf --degrees 90 --output rotated.pdf

# Rotate only page 2
nano-pdf rotate input.pdf --degrees 180 --pages 2 --output rotated.pdf

9. Extract images from a PDF

powershell
nano-pdf extract-images input.pdf --output ./images/

Examples

"Merge contract.pdf and appendix.pdf into one file" → Use step 2: nano-pdf merge contract.pdf appendix.pdf --output final_contract.pdf

"Compress this 50MB report so I can email it" → Use step 4 with --level high to aggressively reduce size.

"Split the quarterly report — I only need pages 10 to 15" → Use step 3 with --pages 10-15.

Cautions

• nano-pdf preserves PDF/A compliance when the input is already PDF/A — check if needed for legal documents
• Aggressive compression (--level high) reduces image resolution — not suitable for print-quality output
• Encrypted or password-protected PDFs cannot be processed without first removing the password
• Very large PDFs (> 200 MB) may require chunked processing — split first, process, then merge
• nano-pdf is a Python package — confirm it is installed before use (pip show nano-pdf)