Splitting PDF file into one PDF file per page or selecting specific pages into one PDF file can be done in Ubuntu in 2 ways, first with the default PDF reader application in Ubuntu, Document Viewer (Evince), and the second by using command line based application PDFtk (PDF toolkit).
*Document Viewer*
Splitting PDF file using the Document Viewer
1. Open PDF file 2. Click Print… or CTRL+P 3. Choose Print to File 4. Click File for output file name 5. Choose Pages then enter the page number you want to split. For example page 10 enter 10, pages 5 to 10 enter 5-10 6. Click Print
Document Viewer – Print
The drawback of Document Viewer is that when you want to split each page into one PDF file it will take a long time because you have to do it repeatedly. For example split PDF file containing 100 pages, must do Print to File up to 100 times.
*PDFtk (PDF toolkit)*
Splitting PDF files using command line based PDFtk
Install PDFtk on Ubuntu 18.04
[INPUT]1 sudo snap install pdftk
Create a pdftk symlink
[INPUT]1 sudo ln -s /snap/pdftk/current/usr/bin/pdftk /usr/bin/pdftk
Split one page (page 10) from a PDF file (fullpage.pdf)
[INPUT]1 pdftk fullpage.pdf cat 10 output page10.pdf
Split pages 5 to 10 of the PDF file
[INPUT]1 pdftk fullpage.pdf cat 5-10 output page5-10.pdf
If you want to split each page, create a simple bash script to run PDFtk repeatedly.
Create a bash script file
[INPUT]1 nano split.sh
Script to split each page of a PDF file with the name file fullpage.pdf which contains 100 pages.
[INPUT]1 2 3 4 5 6 #!/bin/bash for page in {1..100} do pdftk fullpage.pdf cat $page output $page.pdf done
Give execute privileges then run the script
[INPUT]1 2 chmod u+x split.sh ./split.sh
PDFtk can also be used to merge PDF files
[INPUT]1 pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf cat output output.pdf
Good luck ð
