Chopping up a PDF

[Charles Martin]

> From: Robert Crawford <robertc at clancrawford.us>
>
> All of my manuals for work come in PDF format now and I am getting
> tired of waiting for my work laptop to boot up whenever I need anything
> (worse, it is win 2k).  I want to take just the useful portions out of
> these PDF files and make a single file.
>
> So, out of about 12 manuals, about 900 pages each, I want to extract
> 12-14  pages from each and make a single document.  How would I go
> about doing this?

The full version of Acrobat allows for this in a three-step process:

1. Open each manual, delete all the pages you DON'T want, save 
remaining pages as a renamed PDF.
2. Repeat till you have everything you need.
3. Merge the PDFs into a single document.

In Mac OS X there is an alternate, FREE route:

1. Open each manual in Preview. Print "Save as PDF" each sequence of 
pages you want as new PDF documents.
2. Repeat till you have everything you need as PDFs (doesn't matter how 
many of them). Rename them in numerical order
3. Download joinPDF (a command-line app) and PDFJoiner (a GUI for 
joinPDF), install them, and use the latter to merge your new PDFs into 
one PDF.

_Chas_

"Apple is fighting three myths: one is that you pay a huge price 
premium; the second is that there is no software; and the third is that 
they are tremendously proprietary. The truth is, none of those things 
are accurate -- Apple is price competitive relative to their 
competitors; there is plenty of software for the tasks most individuals 
need to do and beyond; and Apple supports far more open standards than 
any other competing operating system. You combine that with a product 
like the G5, and you have to believe that lots of people are going to 
start taking a look at this -- if they can overcome their Apple 
prejudice." -- Michael Gartenberg, Jupiter Research