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