How To Split PDF with pdfseparate

This article contains instructions to split a PDF file to many PDF file with pdfseparate utility. pdfseparate is a part of poppler-utils package, and it is available built-in in Ubuntu. Thanks to Poppler Project and Glyph & Cog for providing this utility.

Summary

 

Refer to this command line example to split with pdfseparate.

• Syntax: pdfseparate <source_pdf_file> <splitted_pdf_name>-%d.pdf
• Example: pdfseparate rootmagz-042015.pdf roo-%d.pdf

Explanation: this command line will invoke pdfseparate, read the source PDF file, and split it into separated PDF files with name format roo-{number}.pdf. You must use %d so pdfseparate can place the number in every PDF file name (i.e. roo-1.pdf, roo-2.pdf, roo-3.pdf).

Split All Pages

pdfseparate <source_pdf_file> <name>-%d.pdf

Explanation: this command will create single PDF files based on every page in source_pdf_file.

Split Selected Pages Only

pdfseparate -f 1 -l 3 <source_pdf_file> <name>-%d.pdf

Explanation: this command will create three PDF files, from page 1 until page 3. 

Split First Page Only

pdfseparate -f 1 -l 1 <source_pdf_file> <name>-%d.pdf

Explanation: this command will create a single PDF file, which is the first page of source_pdf_file.

Split Last Page Only

pdfseparate -f 8 -l 8 <source_pdf_file> <name>-%d.pdf