Slicing and dicing PDFs —05 August 2015

The other day I needed to trim down a lengthy PDF file: extract some pages in the middle into a new file. I thought my regular PDF viewer might be smart enough today to do this kind of thing easily, but no such luck. Back to good old command line tools :-)

Here’s one way using psutils, extracting from page 11 until the end:

pdftops input.pdf - | psselect -p11- | ps2pdf14 - shorter.pdf

Here’s another way using pdftk, cutting out page 11-20:

pdftk A=input.pdf cat A11-20 output out.pdf

Or using Ghostscript:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -dFirstPage=11 -sOutputFile=input.pdf out.pdf