OT: splitting PDF files

[Scott]

Why are there all these online sites to upload, split and download PDF files? It seems to me all that is needed is to send the relevant pages to the virtual printer as a PDF file.

[Max Demian]

Not everyone has a virtual PDF printer. (I use doPDF 8 on Win7.)

[Andy Burns]

If you want to keep the files local, use pdfSAM (Split And Merge)

[Brian Gaff]

I'd say because pdf files are converted to raw bits to print, ie they are not using smarts in the printer but are converting them in the computer.

The whole original idea of Portable Document Format was to stop people tinkering with them and making incorrect versions. If it could be split that might defeat the object Depending on the level of protection though some allow conversion to word or txt format and then you can do as you like but its been my experience that if they are not tagged for reading order changes then you get a complete mess out of the end. Also a lot of online pdf files seem to be mere copies of a bitmap of a scanned in document and these are just basically pictures so trying to convert then normally makes them blank. Brian

[Jeff Layman]

I think you'll find that the original intention of the PDF was that it could be read on any OS, and was platform-independent. Adobe allowed - or perhaps I should say included - editing facilities very early on if you were willing to pay for it. The Adobe Reader was free; Adobe Acrobat (a suite of programs) was, if I remember correctly, on the expensive side.

[Reentrant]

I did that before I found PDFSAM, but found that sometimes the filesize increased enormously.

[charles]

You can lock a pdf yo prevent editing, but I agree the format was designed to be platform independent.

[Scott]

Foxit (which is free) allows me to print selected pages to 'Foxit reader pdf printer'. This seems to me far preferable to uploading, splitting and downloading.

[DJC]

Probably because the 'print to PDF' was embedding a bit map image for printing into a PDF file rather than a true PDF (ie text + fonts).

[Max Demian]

I use an old version of Foxit (2.0) as it loads much more quickly than Adobe.

[AnthonyL]

Use pdftk and split, join, reorder etc at will.

[RJH]

Without wishing to wind up unduly, you can do this natively on a Mac, using Preview. View with the 'Thumbnail' sidebar and delete the pages you don't want there.

[PeterC]

Using YAPP (Yet Another PDF Printer will, ime, degrade the file and increase its size - just chop it up:

needs some exploring but will do everything.

[mm0fmf]

Everything loads much more quickly than Adobe's products.

SumatraPDF and evince on Windows here, and evince on Linux.

[Scott]

Thanks. Bizarrely, when I downloaded the 'source' file again the pdf print version was changed to make it the same as the new source file. This almost led me to email the pages that needed to be taken out.

I think I will be following your advice in future!

[thomasdark145]

If you are looking for a solution on how to split a large pdf file into smaller ones then I like to suggest PDF Split Software. From my personal experience, this tool is beneficial to Split PDF files. This tool provides the facility to Split PDF by Pages. It helps you to customize the splitting process by selecting the number of pages you want to split at once. The particular split data is saved in a new file name which is given by you. The split process is under your control. To know more about this software kindly visit here:

[Chris Hogg]

WikiHow has four suggestions as to how to split PDF files, none of which are PDF-split.

I use CutePDF; at least it's not spammed here.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa 2)]

And none of them sound like a blatant commercial either cheesy grin. Brian

[polygonum_on_google]

You can also use Lyx (and, underneath, LaTeX). Easy to select a part of a PDF to be inserted into a new PDF. I say "easy", well, it is easy when you have gone through the pain of installing it and working out how to use it at all. (For such a large product, it actually installs easily but does take time and space.)

Further, Lyx makes it fairly straightforward to merge PDFs. I had a project which required grabbing a hundred or two PDFs from web sources and merging them into one big PDF with some extra content. Further, as I found better versions of some pages, I wanted it to be easy to replace PDFs - which I do by rebuilding the big PDF. Takes just a few minutes.

Unlike many of the other options, it really is supplied without charge. (Too, too many of the PDF products like to claim or imply they are free but there are severe limitations on what can be done without paying anything.) If I were making money out of what I have done, it would be fair enough to pay something. I am not. It is, effectively, for charitable purposes.