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I recently upgraded from Adobe Acrobat 6 to 9 and I can't seem to figure outhow to split a large PDF into individual PDFs of various sizes (say, pages 1-3, 4-11, 12, etc.).

I'm aware that A-PDF allows me to pull individual pages form the source document, but I would prefer to set a range & a file-name for each resulting document.

I cannot use an external website for splitting; any suggestions on tools/utilities/whatever I may be missing?

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1 Answer 1

If you don't mind using a command-line utility, pdftk can help.

For example,

pdftk Input.pdf cat 1-3 output Pages_1-3.pdf

will extract pages 1-3 and save them as Pages_1-3.pdf

If you have a set of page ranges and desired output file names, you can save them to a text file as follows:

1-3 Pages_1-3.pdf
4-11 Pages_4-11.pdf
12 Page_12.pdf
13-end Pages_13-end.pdf

Now use the following command at the command prompt:

for /f "tokens=1*" %a in (Input.txt) do pdftk Input.pdf cat %a output %b

to split up the PDF into separate files.

If you simply want to save each page as a separate file, you can use the burst parameter instead. See that man page or type pdftk --help for details.

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Thanks - will give that a try! –  MAB Mar 13 '13 at 13:19

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