Splitting a PDF document in two without purchasing a PDF editing tool

Question

Acrobat Reader allow us to easily save a copy of the PDF document. How can I save only from page 5 to 10 without purchasing a PDF editing tool?

Answer 1

You can send page 5 to 10 to a PDF-printer in such a case. Installing a printer that can print to pdf is freeware, and can be done with little loss.

Answer 2

There are several posibilities:

1. You can use the freeware pdftk. It's an command line program that can extract pages from existing PDF pages and save then again as PDF. There are also several GUI based tools available that base on pdftk.
2. PDF split and merge
3. Furthermore there is even an free online service for extracting PDF pages.

Answer 3

If you install pdftk you can do it with the command pdftk cat. The syntax is weird though, so copy carefully:

pdftk in.pdf cat 2-20 output out.pdf

Answer 4

The PDFill Free PDF Tools include a simple GUI tool for doing this on Windows:

I've found this to be useful for Windows users who don't want to pay for a PDF editor or use the command line. The free tools support various other features like cropping, rotating and page numbering, and while the website encourages you to buy the full-featured PDFill PDF Editor, the free tools don't expire, watermark your PDFs, or nag you to upgrade.

Answer 5

Another free online tool that does what you are asking:

Extract PDF pages: http://www.sejda.com/extract-pdf-pages

Upload the file, specify the page ranges that you want to extract to a separate file (10-20, 22-) and click "Split".

Its an online service, nothing to install.

There's a command line tool as well, if you prefer that: Sejda PDF command line tool

./bin/sejda-console extractpages -f /input/file.pdf --pageSelection 4-10,20- -o /outputDir

Better than the printer solution since this won't change/alter the original PDF pages.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers.

Answer 6

You can create a CMD/Batch script that uses Ghostscript to export pages 5 to 10 of a PDF; you'll first need to ensure that Ghostscript is installed on your Windows machine. Ghostscript can be downloaded from its official website or via Chocolatey:

choco install Ghostscript -y

Once you install Ghostscript, you can write a batch script like the one below. This script assumes that your system's PATH includes the Ghostscript executable (gswin64c.exe for 64-bit systems or gswin32c.exe for 32-bit systems). If it's not, you'll need to provide the full path to the executable in the script.

Create a new text file and rename it to something like ExtractPages.bat, then paste the following script:

@echo off
setlocal

:: Set the path to the input PDF file
set "InputPDF=%~1"

:: Check if the file exists
if not exist "%InputPDF%" (
    echo File not found: %InputPDF%
    exit /b 1
)

:: Set the page range you want to extract
set "StartPage=5"
set "EndPage=10"

:: Set the path to the output PDF file
set "OutputPDF=%~dpn1_pages_%StartPage%_to_%EndPage%.pdf"

:: Run Ghostscript command
gswin64c.exe -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER ^
    -dFirstPage=%StartPage% -dLastPage=%EndPage% ^
    -sOutputFile="%OutputPDF%" "%InputPDF%"

:: Check if the output was successful
if exist "%OutputPDF%" (
    echo.
    echo Pages %StartPage% to %EndPage% extracted to: %OutputPDF%
) else (
    echo.
    echo Failed to extract pages.
)

endlocal

To use this script, you would run it from the command line, passing the path to the PDF file as an argument. For example:

ExtractPages.bat "C:\path\to\your\document.pdf"

This will create a new PDF containing only pages 5 to 10 of the specified document. Remember to replace gswin64c.exe with gswin32c.exe if you're on a 32-bit system.

Answer 7

Here is free tool that can do exactly what you are asking :

http://multi-convert.com/split-pdf

Put start and end pages + number of the pages in the single file.