I wish to reduce a multihundred page PDF document.

February 23, 2019 12:35 AM

I wish to take a multihundred page PDF document and reduce it to only the dozens of pages I require.

Greetings, Sapients! I have a PDF of my entire military record, and I am filing some applications and requests that need only a small portion of the pages in this document. If I had my druthers, I would wave my druther wand and select each individual page as I scroll through, then click my export button and out pops my selected pages as a new PDF file. I currently use FoxIt on Windows instead of the Adobe PDF reader which has displeased me in the past, but lately FoxIt has also been increasingly displeasing. If FoxIt has this functionality hidden somewhere I can't find it then that would be good, but I am also just fine with another program that does this which would also perform my regular PDF duties.

Thank you for your help, and please ask if I can give any other clarification.

posted by Evilspork to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Best answer: When I need to do this I always print, choose print-to-pdf, and then choose the option to print only specific pages, which I list in that little box. (For example it'll look like: 2,8,12-15,23,25-27,33) It creates a new pdf with only those pages in it.

It's a bit clunky for a solution as you have to note every individual page manually (there may be better automated solutions out there, idk), but for me this is easy and I like that it works every time without requiring special software or following some multi-step process.
posted by phunniemee at 12:43 AM on February 23, 2019 [8 favorites]

Best answer: Do you have access to a Mac by any chance? With the Preview app (which comes standard in the OS) it's extremely easy to do stuff with pdf documents -- deleting pages, dragging pages out of a document, combining pages into a new multi-page document, and re-arranging pages.
posted by theory at 12:46 AM on February 23, 2019 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Thank you, phunniemee, and while I don't have a Mac anymore, theory, that's a good option to know about.
posted by Evilspork at 12:47 AM on February 23, 2019

Best answer: You can also do this at smallpdf.com though I’m not sure how well it would play with a document of that size. You’d probably need to know in advance which pages you want as the selection screen shows thumbnails of about 1.5" height, but it does make it simple to go through and click on them fairly quickly (choose the split pdf option).
posted by penguin pie at 1:31 AM on February 23, 2019 [2 favorites]

Best answer: There are also tools like Split PDF that can do this.
posted by terretu at 1:34 AM on February 23, 2019 [2 favorites]

Best answer: I use pdftk for this sort of thing (and more convoluted PDF operations). There is a Windows version (now available for Windows 8! no idea if it works on modern Windows), though I've only used the command line tool on *nix.
posted by hoyland at 5:06 AM on February 23, 2019 [4 favorites]

Best answer: I use GIMP and import the multipage pdf, pick it apart and then export a selected page as a jpg. Here are instructions. You may have to fiddle with it a bit.

I haven't found a way to pick apart the multipage pdf and export a select page as a pdf.
posted by jointhedance at 5:34 AM on February 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

If it's one-off task, you could use the free trial version of Adobe Acrobat Pro (much as I hate to promote Adobe, I used to extract and delete pages all the time and it's so damn easy with the Pro version).
posted by humph at 6:49 AM on February 23, 2019

Best answer: Oh hang on, there's a similar-ish previous question and PDFsam is recommended, amongst other tools, such as PDFill.
posted by humph at 6:51 AM on February 23, 2019 [1 favorite]

Best answer: PDF Split and Merge can do this, too.
posted by yclipse at 9:25 AM on February 23, 2019 [2 favorites]