pdftk-java is a community project that arose since the dropping of pdftk from the major repositories, with the goal of porting the original pdftk project entirely to Java, and thereby extricating it from any dependency on the gcj C compiler. Thanks to user1686 for pointing out pdftk-java. Qpdf is also available and actively maintained on most other major Unix-like systems, including Ubuntu and Fedora. The one criticism I have of the tool is that its website and documentation looks a lot less prettier (and therefore, less approachable) compared to pdftk's, but the tool itself appears to have all of the same functionality. Given what I now knew of the last time that pdftk was updated, I opted to use qpdf and so far haven't been disappointed. I personally had two options available to me: to install the Windows binary of the pdftk, which would result in an installation separate to the rest of my Cygwin environment, or to use a different but similar tool that is available from the Cygwin repository, such as qpdf. However, it seems nothing came from this "pre-beta", since the last time the official pdftk had any update at all was in 2013. Working on a new pdftk that doesn't depend on libgcj, but it is Yes, I've heard that they're dropping support for libgcj. An email exchange here from 2014 - two years before GCJ was finally dropped by GCC - cites the developer of pdftk as saying: I gave up attempting to build pdftk for my own Cygwin system because of the gcj dependency, and because I couldn't trust a tool from developers who insist on using dependencies that have been deprecated for 4 years now. As a result of this, many repositories have also dropped the (no-longer-buildable) pdftk package itself from their repositories, including Fedora, Ubuntu and Cygwin. GCJ was officially removed from GCC in September 2016, and therefore subsequently discontinued by the package repositories for the various distros. Pdftk relied on the gcj package, which is the GCC compiler for Java.
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