2.0 KiB
Remove Pages From A PDF
I have a two page PDF. I really only need to second page though. I want to send that second page to someone and including the first page with it will only cause confusion. I couldn't figure out a sane way to do this on MacOS with either Preview or Notes (where the PDF originated).
So, I looked into a tool I'd heard of recently for manipulating PDFs called
qpdf.
qpdf is a command-line tool and C++ library that performs content-preserving transformations on PDF files.
I installed it with homebrew and then looked up how "removing" pages works.
Conceptually, qpdf is used to transform a PDF. That means there are a couple
ways I can think about approaching this.
If I want to preserve every page except for the first page, then I produce a PDF
that starts at page 2 and goes to the end (z) by specifying a range of
2-z.
qpdf in.pdf --pages . 2-z -- out.pdf
If I truly only want the 2nd page from the PDF and nothing else, then I can
produce a PDF made up of only page 2.
qpdf in.pdf --pages . 2 -- out.pdf
Yet another way to think about this is to produce a PDF that includes all pages,
but then explicitly mark page 1 for exclusion after the range with x1.
qpdf in.pdf --pages . 1-z,x1 -- out.pdf
And one last way, assuming that I am dealing specifically with a two-page PDF,
is to use the rN syntax where N is the number of pages from the back of the
list. r1 is the last page, r2 is the second to last page, and so forth. In a
two-page PDF, r2 would then refer to the _first_page.
qpdf in.pdf --pages . 1-z,xr2 -- out.pdf
I know I said that was the last, but I'll also throw in that, again assuming a
two-page PDF, I could produce a PDF made up of only :even numbered pages
relative to the defined range.
qpdf in.pdf --pages . 1-z:even -- out.pdf
I'll stick with the first approach, but it was fun to experiment with all the
other ways this can be done with qpdf's flexible syntax.