Apple - Dividing PDFs on a Mac
Yesterday morning I had to take an approximately 100 page PDF document and divide it into 56 individual documents. I had a way to do this previously, but it involved selecting the to print and saving as PDF - more steps than I wanted to do for as many as I was dividing into this morning. So, in the search and trial to changing my process to being more efficient, I discovered a neat trick with Apple's Preview.
Make sure your Sidebar tray is showing thumbnails (here's the icon to turn it on if it is not):
Select (highlight) your selection in the Sidebar tray (tricks for multiple pages - 1. if they are consecutive you can click the first, hold down shift & click the last to select the range; 2. if they are NOT consecutive you can hold the command key while selecting the pages you want)
Copy (here's the menu selection, you can also command+C)
You will note in the File Menu that the choice for New has changed to New From Clipboard - select that to create a new document from your selection
Make sure to save it!
If you are like me and whittling down a huge document, you can then deleted the pages you "extracted" out so that the document only has pages left you have not worked with yet.
Make sure your Sidebar tray is showing thumbnails (here's the icon to turn it on if it is not):
Select (highlight) your selection in the Sidebar tray (tricks for multiple pages - 1. if they are consecutive you can click the first, hold down shift & click the last to select the range; 2. if they are NOT consecutive you can hold the command key while selecting the pages you want)
Copy (here's the menu selection, you can also command+C)
You will note in the File Menu that the choice for New has changed to New From Clipboard - select that to create a new document from your selection
Make sure to save it!
If you are like me and whittling down a huge document, you can then deleted the pages you "extracted" out so that the document only has pages left you have not worked with yet.