I try to split a multipage PDF with Ghostscript, and I found the same solution on more sites and even on ghostscript.com, namely:
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dSAFER -o outname.%d.pdf input.pdf But it seems not working for me, because it produces one file, with all pages, and with the name outname.1.pdf. When I add the start and end pages, then it is working fine, but I want it to work without knowing those parameters. In the gs-devel archive, I found a solution for this: http://ghostscript.com/pipermail/gs-devel/2009-April/008310.html -- but I feel like doing it without pdf_info . When I use a different device, for example pswrite , but same parameters, it works correctly, producing as many ps files, as my input.pdf contains. Is this normal when using pdfwrite ? Am I doing something wrong?
89.4k 24 24 gold badges 264 264 silver badges 350 350 bronze badges asked Apr 19, 2012 at 12:57 1,099 2 2 gold badges 12 12 silver badges 15 15 bronze badgesI found this script wriiten by Mr Weimer super useful:
#!/bin/sh # # pdfsplit [input.pdf] [first_page] [last_page] [output.pdf] # # Example: pdfsplit big_file.pdf 10 20 pages_ten_to_twenty.pdf # # written by: Westley Weimer, Wed Mar 19 17:58:09 EDT 2008 # # The trick: ghostscript (gs) will do PDF splitting for you, it's just not # obvious and the required defines are not listed in the manual page. if [ $# -lt 4 ] then echo "Usage: pdfsplit input.pdf first_page last_page output.pdf" exit 1 fi gs -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile="$4" -dFirstPage=$2 -dLastPage=$3 -sDEVICE=pdfwrite "$1" save it as pdfsplit.sh , see the magic happens.
PDFSAM also could do the job. Available on Windows and Mac.
7,761 4 4 gold badges 33 33 silver badges 51 51 bronze badges answered May 9, 2012 at 4:34 Juanito Fatas Juanito Fatas 9,779 10 10 gold badges 49 49 silver badges 72 72 bronze badges Amazing. I don't have pdftk and psselect would lose some pdf quality, but not this. Commented Jan 4, 2013 at 13:01 Thank you for the pointer to the -dFirstPage=… and -dLastPage=… parameters! Commented Sep 19, 2020 at 11:56What you see is "normal" behaviour: the current version of Ghostscript's pdfwrite output device does not support this feature. This is also (admittedly, somehow vaguely) documented in Use.htm:
"Note, however that the one page per file feature may not be supported by all devices. "
I seem to remember that one of the Ghostscript developers mentioned on IRC that they may add this feature to pdfwrite in some future release, but it seems to necessitate some major code rewrite, which is why they haven't done it yet.
Update: As Gordon's comment already hinted at, as of version 9.06 (released on July 31st, 2012), Ghostscript now supports the commandline as quoted in the question also for pdfwrite . (Gordon must have discovered the unofficial support for this already in 9.05, or he compiled his own executable from the pre-release sources which were not yet tagged as 9.06).
answered Apr 19, 2012 at 14:53 Kurt Pfeifle Kurt Pfeifle 89.4k 24 24 gold badges 264 264 silver badges 350 350 bronze badgesYeah, I read this line, but my phrase "normal behaviour" wants to mean that "is pdfwrite one of those who may not support this feature?" Your remembering of this IRC is okay for me, Thank you.
Commented Apr 19, 2012 at 15:42For people finding this answer in searches: As of 9.05, one-page-per-file works for me with the OP's command.
Commented Jul 4, 2012 at 19:05@Gordon: Support for the -o out_%d.pdf syntax (to split multipage PDF into individual files per page) became official in 9.06. I hinted at this already in other answers (f.e. Split multi page PDF file into single pages). I forgot to update this answer. Thanks for the hint.
Commented Nov 26, 2012 at 14:21 #!/bin/bash #where $1 is the input filename ournum=`gs -q -dNODISPLAY -c "("$1") (r) file runpdfbegin pdfpagecount = quit" 2>/dev/null` echo "Processing $ournum pages" counter=1 while [ $counter -le $ournum ] ; do newname=`echo $1 | sed -e s/\.pdf//g` reallynewname=$newname-$counter.pdf counterplus=$((counter+1)) # make the individual pdf page yes | gs -dBATCH -sOutputFile="$reallynewname" -dFirstPage=$counter -dLastPage=$counter -sDEVICE=pdfwrite "$1" >& /dev/null counter=$counterplus done
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answered Nov 10, 2013 at 2:40
John Ostrowick John Ostrowick
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Here is a script for Windows command prompt (working also with drag and drop) assuming you have Ghostscript installed:
@echo off chcp 65001 setlocal enabledelayedexpansion rem Customize or remove this line if you already have Ghostscript folders in your system PATH set path=C:\Program Files\gs\gs9.22\lib;C:\Program Files\gs\gs9.22\bin;%path% :start echo Splitting "%~n1%~x1" into standalone single pages. cd %~d1%~p1 rem getting number of pages of PDF with GhostScript for /f "usebackq delims=" %%a in (`gswin64c -q -dNODISPLAY -c "(%~n1%~x1) (r) file runpdfbegin pdfpagecount = quit"`) do set "numpages=%%a" for /L %%n in (1,1,%numpages%) do ( echo Extracting page %%n of %numpages%. set "x=00%%n" set "x=!x:~-3!" gswin64c.exe -dNumRenderingThreads=2 -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dFirstPage=%%n -dLastPage=%%n -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile="%~d1%~p1%~n1-!x!.pdf" %1 ) shift if NOT x%1==x goto start pause Name this script something like split PDF.bat and put it on your desktop. Drag and drop one (or even more) multipage PDF on it and it will create one standalone PDF file for each page of your PDF, appending the suffix -001 , -002 and so on to the name to distinguish the pages.
You might need to customize (with relevant Ghostscript version) or remove the set path=. line if you already have Ghostscript folders in your system PATH environment variable.
It works for me under Windows 10 with Ghostscript 9.22. See comments to see if it can work with newer Ghostscript versions.