Command Line – How to Create a Blank PDF

From http://blog.chewearn.com/2008/12/18/rearrange-pdf-pages-with-pdftk/

pdftk A=src.pdf B=blank.pdf cat A1 B1 A2-end output res.pdf

Hope you like this script, just save it as pdfInsertBlankPageAt.sh, add execute permissions, and run.

./pdfInsertBlankPageAt 5 src.pdf res.pdf

#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -ne 3 ]
then
  echo "Usage example: ./pdfInsertBlankPageAt 5 src.pdf res.pdf"
  exit $E_BADARGS
else
  pdftk A=$2 B=blank.pdf cat A1-$(($1-1)) B1 A$1-end output $3
fi 

cat A1 B1 A2-end means that the output file will contain the first page of document A (src.pdf) followed by the first page of document B (blank.pdf) followed by the rest (pages 2 to end) of document B. This operation is called concatenation, Linux cat is very often used to display text, but it is interesting when used with more than one argument.

To create blank.pdf, see How do I create a blank PDF from the command line?

OK ... I think pdflatex is the missing piece here.

The OP said he has looked into poppler-utils and pdftk. Let me add to that pdfimages. These, together with pdflatex are the pieces of a solution.

pdfimages -f 4 -l 20 -j -png target.pdf imageroot

In the example code above, pdfimages looks through pages 4 through 20 of target.pdf and extracts all images into files with names beginning imageroot.

poppler-utils provides pdftotext. I recommend the -layout option which does a great job keeping the document human readable.

pdftotext -layout $1.pdf $1.txt

The OP's objection to the imagemagick solution offered by pidosaurus is that an image does not have extractable text. With the utilities I outlined, the OP will now have all the images as well as all the extracted text, and page numbers and contents are retained by the -layout option. The OP could identify the correct page of text and chuck it into a .tex file which ends with an %includegraphics directive and refers to the replacement picture by filename. You then pdflatex this and end up with a new single-page .pdf to insert into the rest of your document with pdftk. If you knew where in the text of the original page the image resided, you can %includegraphics [h] and get the image in exactly the right place.