Is there a command-line method to split a multi-page PDF file into single pages?

I have started to put together a tool to provide a simplified interface to common actions.

You can split PDFs into individual pages like this:

$ npm install @lancejpollard/act -g
$ act split my.pdf -o outputDirectory

If nothing else check out the source and see how to write your own script to do this in JavaScript.

If you want to extract a range of pages, you can use the following script which you call like this (assumed that you save it to file pdfextract.py somewhere on your system's PATH, e.g. /usr/local/bin, and assign it execution permission with chmod 744 pdfextract.py):

pdfextract.py --file-in /path/to/large/pdf --file-out /path/to/new/pdf --start --stop

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-


import argparse
import os
import subprocess as sp


def main():
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
    parser.add_argument('--file-in', required=True, type=str, dest='file_in')
    parser.add_argument('--file-out', required=True, type=str, dest='file_out')
    parser.add_argument('--start', required=True, type=int, dest='start', default=-1)
    parser.add_argument('--stop', required=True, type=int, dest='stop', default=-1)

    args = parser.parse_args()
    assert os.path.isfile(args.file_in)
    assert not os.path.isfile(args.file_out)

    # remove temporary files
    for el in os.listdir('/tmp'):
        if os.path.isfile(os.path.join('/tmp', el)) and el[:12] == 'pdfseparate-':
            os.remove(os.path.join('/tmp', el))

    sp.check_call('pdfseparate -f {:d} -l {:d} {:s} /tmp/pdfseparate-%d.pdf'.format(args.start, args.stop, args.file_in), shell=True)

    cmd_unite = 'pdfunite '
    for i in range(args.start, args.stop + 1):
        cmd_unite += '/tmp/pdfseparate-{:d}.pdf '.format(i)
    cmd_unite += args.file_out
    sp.check_call(cmd_unite, shell=True)

    # remove temporary files
    for el in os.listdir('/tmp'):
        if os.path.isfile(os.path.join('/tmp', el)) and el[:12] == 'pdfseparate-':
            os.remove(os.path.join('/tmp', el))


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

For another alternative, see this answer. This uses the ImageMagick command line tools.

convert x.pdf -quality 100 -density 300x300 x-%04d.pdf

However, you have to be careful with the quality.

This can be achieved by using pdfseparate. You can install poppler with homebrew, by brew install poppler. This will also install pdfseparate. To split the PDF document.pdf into into single pages 1.pdf, 2.pdf, etc. use:

pdfseparate document.pdf %d.pdf

If you're interested in doing this from the command line, you can look at Benjamin Han's splitPDF python script to do the job. For instance:

splitPDF.py in.pdf 3 5

would split the file in.pdf into 3 files, splitting at pages 3 and 5.

Open up the pdf in preview and then on the view menu select thumbnails. Ctrl select the pages that you want now drag and drop them to the desktop.