Extract even-numbered and odd-numbered pages of a PDF into two separate PDFs

I'd do it with pdftk.

pdftk A=all.pdf cat Aodd output odd.pdf
pdftk A=all.pdf cat Aeven output even.pdf

pdftk is not Open Source any longer, unfortunately. (That is a long story.)

Plain gs engine can do it, though:

  gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite     \
     -sPageList=odd         \
     -sOutputFile=odd.pdf   \
     -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE      \
     file.pdf

Then substitute 'odd' with 'even' to select even pages.

With poppler-utils tools you could first extract single pages with pdfseparate:

pdfseparate infile.pdf piece-%d.pdf

into pieces like piece-1.pdf, piece-2.pdf ... piece-n.pdf where n is the total number of pages in your original pdf.

You could then join them with pdfunite (and a shell that supports using an increment value with range expansion: {<START>..<END>..<INCR>}):

pdfunite piece-{1..n..2}.pdf odd.pdf
pdfunite piece-{2..n..2}.pdf even.pdf

Finally, remove the pieces:

rm piece-{1..n}.pdf

Related