Efficient Ways to Split PDF on Linux

Part 1Split PDF on Linux with Ghostscript

You can split PDF files using Ghostscript. For Linux users, it is expected that Ghostscript is already installed on your system. Once this is confirmed to be true, you can us this simple script in the following order.

Step 1: #!/bin/bash
# Usage ./PDFsplitr.sh inputfile.PDF outputfile.PDF pagenumber
# Example: ./PDFsplitr.sh myfile.PDF myotherfile.PDF 2
GS=$(which gs)
# Make sure Ghostscript is installed
if [[ $GS = "" ]]
then
echo "Ghostscript is not installed"
exit
fi
# Run the actual conversion.
$GS -sDEVICE=PDFwrite -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sOutputFile=$2 -dFirstPage=$3 -dLastPage=$3 $1

Step 2: Provide the file you wish to split, the output file and page number in this form.
./PDFsplitr.sh myoriginal.PDF mysplittedfile.PDF 2

Step 3:Save your script to 'PDFsplitr.sh' .

Part 2Available PDF Toolkits for Splitting PDF on Linux

1. PDFtk

PDFtk is a toolkit for merging, splitting and attaching files to PDF documents on Linux. In fact, splitting files with the PDFtk is a very interesting experience. For example, if you want to remove some specific pages 20 to 25 from a PDF document, all you need do is to type the command "PDFtk myDocument.PDF cat 1-9 26-end output removedPages.PDF ".

Key Features:

• It has the "Burst" option which gives users the opportunity to split a PDF into multiple files by making it one file for each page.
• It has the ability to remove specific PDF pages from a file easily.
• PDFtk is very flexible and with practice.

2. PDF-Shuffler

The PDF Shuffler is a small Python-GTK application that is capable of splitting and merging PDF files on Linux. You can install it manually which is an easy option or use the supper command sudo apt-get install PDFshuffler.

Key Features:

• When it involves multiple PDF files, you can separately open each file by re clicking the Import button.
• It is important to note that these pages will be added on the viewing window as a series of Thumbnail views.