If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk-java is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. PDFtk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents: Merge PDF documents, split PDF pages into a new document, decrypt input as necessary (password required), encrypt output as desired, burst a PDF document into single pages, report on PDF metrics, including metadata and bookmarks, uncompress and re-compress page streams, and repair corrupted PDF (where possible).

Pdftk-java is a port of the original GCJ-based PDFtk to Java. The GNU Compiler for Java (GCJ) is a portable, optimizing, ahead-of-time compiler for the Java programming language, which had no new developments since 2009 and was finally removed in 2016 from the GCC development tree before the release of GCC 7.