Quickly extracting individual pages from a document

Question

Let's say I have created a 100-page book with the book document class.

What is the quickest way to extract, say, pages 3, 67-70, and 80 from the book into six separate PDF files? Is there any standard tool/script out there that does this very quickly?

Manually doing this through a UI is rather tedious.

You may also want to look at this tool: pdfShuffler – kan Oct 29 '12 at 23:28 — kan, Oct 29 '12 at 23:28

Vincent Nivoliers · Accepted Answer · 2014-02-25T11:25:33.607

73

You can use the pdfjam tool with the syntax

pdfjam <input file> <page ranges> -o <output file>

and an example of page ranges would be

3,67-70,80

to extract page 3, pages 67 to 70 and page 80, and put these pages into a single document. Note however that this will break the hyperlinks in your document.

[edit] pdfjam is actually a front end for pdfpages, suggested in an other answer.

You could also use pdfseparate from poppler to burst a document into separate pages. Using

pdfseparate <document> 'page_%d.pdf'

using the result of pdfjam as a document will give you files named page_1.pdf … page_6.pdf containing all the desired pages.

edited Feb 25 '14 at 11:25

answered Oct 29 '12 at 22:04

Vincent Nivoliers

1,536

1

It will remove all of the hyperlinks, so this method should be discouraged. – Jongwook Choi Jan 23 '19 at 23:30
@JongwookChoi: Do you know of a method that does not remove hyperlinks as I thought they all did. I can understand why it might be complicated to retain internal links, but external links should be able to be kept. – Peter Grill Jul 25 '19 at 23:29

score 40 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 10 '20 at 12:32

40

You can do this with the pdfpages package.

Code:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
    \includepdf[pages={3,67-70,80}]{<pdf-file>}
\end{document}

edited Jun 10 '20 at 12:32

Community

1

answered Oct 29 '12 at 22:01

Peter Grill

223,288

If your pdf does not have the same format as article (or another easy default), you can use the fitpaper key to \includepdf to have the paper size automatically adjusted. – schtandard Jun 30 '23 at 17:59

score 19 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 29 '12 at 22:14

19

You can perform lots of tasks with pdf files using pdftk. For example,

pdftk big_file.pdf cat 3 output page3.pdf

creates a new file page3.pdf from page 3 of big_file.pdf. You can also use ranges; replacing 3 with 67-70 extracts pages 67-70.

answered Oct 29 '12 at 22:14

Ian Thompson

43,767

2

If I remember right there's also a burst directive to split it into single page files. – Andrew Stacey Oct 30 '12 at 08:08
1

Yes. But: not avalable in Centos7 – gdm May 13 '15 at 14:39

SparkAndShine · Answer 4 · 2015-11-28T16:04:53.023

7

Use PDFtk (the manual is here),

pdftk "input.pdf" cat 3 67-70 80 output "output.pdf"

edited Nov 28 '15 at 16:04

answered Jun 11 '15 at 09:44

SparkAndShine

4,163

Laurent Duval · Answer 5 · 2022-04-28T07:37:55.573

2

PDFsam (PDF split and merge) is a little more general tool I use often. It now comes in different flavors, with

PDFsam Basic, a free and open source solution for casual users. Split, merge, mix, extract pages and rotate PDF files.

edited Apr 28 '22 at 07:37

answered Nov 28 '15 at 16:11

Laurent Duval

453

1

PDFsam Basic is free and it's easy to use. thanks. – Evan Hu May 29 '22 at 09:42

Quickly extracting individual pages from a document

5 Answers5

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