When it comes to preparing documents for important applications like the UK’s ILR (Indefinite Leave to Remain), efficiency and ease of use are everything. Recently, I needed to create a PDF from my passport pictures, and after some trial and error, I found a workflow that saved me a ton of time and frustration — all thanks to a fantastic open-source tool called PDF Arranger.

The Struggle with LibreOffice Draw

At first, I tried using LibreOffice Draw to assemble my passport photos into a PDF. Unfortunately, it was painfully slow, and arranging the imported images was a hassle. The interface just wasn’t built for this kind of task, and I quickly realized I needed a better solution.

Command-Line Magic: Image Conversion and Compression

I turned to the command line for help. Using ImageMagick’s convert command, I resized and compressed all my JPEG images with this simple command:

convert *.jpg -resize 1240x1754 -quality 70 -compress jpeg passport.pdf

This created a PDF from my images, but the file was still quite large — around 41 MB. To shrink it further, I used Ghostscript to compress the PDF:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \ -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=passport_small.pdf passport.pdf

This brought the file size down to a manageable 6 MB, perfect for uploading.

Enter PDF Arranger: The Perfect PDF UI

After compression, I wanted to fine-tune the page order and make some adjustments. That’s when I discovered PDF Arranger — a small, intuitive Python GTK application that lets you merge, split, rotate, crop, and rearrange PDF pages with ease.

Using PDF Arranger was a game-changer. Its clean interface made it incredibly simple to delete unwanted pages, rotate images, and reorder everything exactly how I wanted. It felt like the perfect tool for anyone who needs to manipulate PDFs without the bloat and complexity of larger software.

Debian Linux Environment (and WSL2?)

All these steps and tools were used on a Debian Linux system. I’m not sure if the entire workflow works natively on Windows, but it might be possible to run it using Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2). WSL2 provides a Linux environment on Windows and could allow these tools to operate similarly without needing a full Linux installation.

Why I’m Giving PDF Arranger a Star

I don’t usually give stars on GitHub, but this project genuinely made me happy. It’s lightweight, efficient, and just works — exactly what I needed for my ILR application documents. If you’re looking for a hassle-free way to manage PDFs, I highly recommend giving PDF Arranger a try.

You can check out the project and show your support here: PDF Arranger on GitHub.