How to split colored and grayscale pages of a PDF?

Question

How do I split colored and grayscale pages of a PDF in Linux, so I can print with less cost?

Answer 1

A quick and dirty way of separating a document's colored and black-white pages would be as follows:

input=input.pdf; color_output=color_$input; wb_output=wb_$input; pdfjam $input $(gs -o - -sDEVICE=inkcov $input | grep -v " 0.00000  0.00000  0.00000" | grep -B1 "OK" | grep "Page" | awk '{print $2","}' | sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/ /g' | rev | cut -c 2- | rev | sed 's/ //g') -o $color_output && pdfjam $input $(gs -o - -sDEVICE=inkcov $input | grep -B1 " 0.00000  0.00000  0.00000" | grep "Page" | awk '{print $2","}' | sed ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/ /g' | rev | cut -c 2- | rev | sed 's/ //g') -o $wb_output

Just change the name input.pdf to your desired one. It makes use of gs to detect colored/bw pages and pdfjam to merge split pages.

PS: It is not working perfectly. Some grayscale pages may be detected as colored (due to nature of the CMYK representation of them). However this just saves time (and money).