Make a PDF of all the first pages of PDFs

April 4, 2020 10:40 AM

I have a large number of e-books in PDF format. I would like to print just the covers and put them in a folder so I can browse through them. The easiest way would be to extract the first page of each to a single PDF and then print that. How to do. I am on a windows PC and don't want to spend any money.
posted by Iteki to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

This isn't a direct answer to your question but if you're trying to organize your PDFs into a collection that you can browse easily, Calibre will do this automatically. When you add a PDF to your collection in Calibre, the cover shown in the summary should be the first page from the PDF. There are some screenshots here that you can browse to get a feel for it.
posted by bright flowers at 10:49 AM on April 4, 2020 [3 favorites]

Best answer: I use PDFsam Basic for things like this all the time. "Merge, split, extract pages, rotate and mix your PDF files. Available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Free and open source since 2006."
posted by davcoo at 10:58 AM on April 4, 2020 [5 favorites]

Came here to also mention Calibre, the ur-tool for managing ebooks in all formats. And the price is right.
posted by jquinby at 12:06 PM on April 4, 2020

Response by poster: Perfect, took five minutes including download time, thank you!
posted by Iteki at 12:55 PM on April 4, 2020 [1 favorite]

PDFtk - The PDF Toolkit is another free option that slices and dices PDFs.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:04 PM on April 4, 2020 [1 favorite]