Edit PDF files in Ubuntu / remove text from PDF

Recently I had to remove a footer from a pdf document, as the document is over
100 pages and I need to do this on a monthly basis manual editing was not an option (oh and I am waaaay to lazy to do it manually)

After some research the following command line options worked like a charm:

Install qpdf and pdftk:

sudo apt-get install qpdf pdftk

Uncompress the pdf document:

qpdf --qdf --object-streams=disable source.pdf uncompressed.pdf

Then remove the text (footer) with the following sed:

sed -e "s/string to be removed/ /g" <uncompressed.pdf >removed.pdf

And lastly repair the pdf and compress it again.

pdftk removed.pdf output target.pdf compress

remember to clean up and remove all the interim files.

Easy way to determine missing file on Ubuntu

If you experience something like the following:

libXi.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory 

apt-file can come in very handy,

sudo apt-get install apt-file 

then the following commands to identify and install the correct object containing the missing file.

sudo apt-get install apt-file 

apt-file update

apt-file search libXi.so.6 
libxi6: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libXi.so.6

sudo apt-get install libxi6