Split PDF into documents with several pages each

Question

There are several resources on the web explaining how one can split a PDF into many files with on page per file.

But how can you split them into chunks of, say, five pages each? I have looked into the standard tools such as pdftk but could not find an option doing what I want.

Answer 1

pdftk is able to cut out a fixed set of pages efficiently. With a bit of scripting glue, this does what I want:

number=$(pdfinfo -- "$file" 2> /dev/null | awk '$1 == "Pages:" {print $2}')
count=$((number / pagesper))
filename=${file%.pdf}

counter=0
while [ "$count" -gt "$counter" ]; do 
  start=$((counter*pagesper + 1));
  end=$((start + pagesper - 1));

  counterstring=$(printf %04d "$counter")
  pdftk "$file" cat "${start}-${end}" output "${filename}_${counterstring}.pdf"

  counter=$((counter + 1))
done

This assumes that you have the number of pages per chunk in $pagesper and the filename of the source PDF in $file.

If you have acroread installed, you can also use

acroread -size a4 -start "$start" -end "$end" -pairs "$file" "${filename}_${counterstring}.ps"

acroread offers the option -toPostScript which may be useful.

Answer 2

See also pdfseparate and pdfunite from poppler-utils. pdfseparate breaks the file into one file per page which makes it relatively easy to reassemble at will later on with pdfunite, manually or (semi-)automatically.

Like with zsh:

autoload zargs

reunite() pdfunite "$@" file-$1-$argv[-1].pdf

pdfseparate file.pdf p%d
zargs -n 5 p<->(n) -- reunite
rm -f p<->

would split file.pdf into file-p1-p5.pdf, file-p6-p10.pdf...

Answer 3

I find Python with the PyPdf library convenient for those jobs that pdftk doesn't do conveniently (or at all).

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys
from pyPdf import PdfFileWriter, PdfFileReader

# Command line parsing
if len(sys.argv) < 2 or sys.argv[1][-4:] != '.pdf':
    sys.stderr.writeln('Usage: ' + sys.argv[0] + ''' FILE.pdf N
Split FILE.pdf into chunks of N pages each.''')
    exit(3)
pages_per_file = int(sys.argv[2])

base_name = sys.argv[1][:-4] + '-'
input_pdf = PdfFileReader(open(sys.argv[1]))
output_pdf = PdfFileWriter()
num_pages = input_pdf.getNumPages()
for i in xrange(num_pages):
    output_pdf.addPage(input_pdf.getPage(i))
    if (i + 1) % pages_per_file == 0 or i + 1 == num_pages:
        output_file = open(base_name + str(i / pages_per_file + 1) + '.pdf', "wb")
        output_pdf.write(output_file)
        output_file.close()
        output_pdf = PdfFileWriter()

Answer 4

The solution posted by Raphael is flawed: if you have an uneven number of pages, the last ones are just ignored. There it is an improved solution that works also with an uneven number of pages. Again, assumes that you have the number of pages per chunk in $pagesper and the filename of the source PDF in $file.

number=$(pdfinfo -- "$file" 2> /dev/null | awk '$1 == "Pages:" {print $2}')

count=$((($number+$pagesper-1)/$pagesper))
filename=${file%.pdf}

counter=0
while [ "$count" -gt "$counter" ]; do
  start=$((counter*pagesper + 1));
  end=$((start + pagesper - 1));
  if [ $end -gt $number ]; then
    end=$number
  fi

  counterstring=$(printf %04d "$counter")
  pdftk "$file" cat "${start}-${end}" output "${filename}_${counterstring}.pdf"
  counter=$((counter + 1))
done