Split each PDF page in two?

Question

I have a large number of PDF files which have two slides to a page (for printing).

The format is A4 pages each with two slides setup like so:

-----------
| slide 1 |
-----------
| slide 2 |
-----------

How can I generate a new PDF file with one slide per page?

Happy to use GUI, CLI, scripts or even interface with a language's PDF library; but I do need the text on the slides to still be selectable.

Answer 1

mutool works brillantly for this. The example below will chop each page of input.pdf into 3 horizontal and 8 vertical parts (thus creating 24 pages of output for each 1 of input):

mutool poster -x 3 -y 8 input.pdf output.pdf

To install mutool, just install mupdf, which is probably packaged with most GNU/Linux distributions.

(Credits to marttt.)

On debian based linux systems like ubuntu, you can install it using

sudo apt install mupdf
sudo apt install mupdf-tools

Answer 2

Briss is "a simple cross-platform (Linux, Windows, Mac OSX) application for cropping PDF files. A simple user interface lets you define exactly the crop-region by fitting a rectangle on the visually overlaid pages." It's open source (GPL).

Works well for me. The GUI is minimal, but functional. It can also be used from the command line.

Answer 3

PDF Scissors allowed me to bulk split (crop) all pages in a PDF.

Answer 4

Thanks to moraes for that answer. In my case, the resulting PDF looked fine in Adobe Reader and Mac preview, but did not appear to have been split into separate pages at all when viewing on iOS. I used Python 2.7.8 and PyPDF 2, and modified the script as follows, which worked fine. (and reordered the pages left/right, rather than right/left).

import copy
import math
from PyPDF2 import PdfFileReader, PdfFileWriter

def split_pages(src, dst):
    src_f = file(src, 'r+b')
    dst_f = file(dst, 'w+b')

    input = PdfFileReader(src_f)
    output = PdfFileWriter()

    for i in range(input.getNumPages()):
        p = input.getPage(i)
        q = copy.copy(p)
        q.mediaBox = copy.copy(p.mediaBox)

        x1, x2 = p.mediaBox.lowerLeft
        x3, x4 = p.mediaBox.upperRight

        x1, x2 = math.floor(x1), math.floor(x2)
        x3, x4 = math.floor(x3), math.floor(x4)
        x5, x6 = math.floor(x3/2), math.floor(x4/2)

        if x3 > x4:
            # horizontal
            p.mediaBox.upperRight = (x5, x4)
            p.mediaBox.lowerLeft = (x1, x2)

            q.mediaBox.upperRight = (x3, x4)
            q.mediaBox.lowerLeft = (x5, x2)
        else:
            # vertical
            p.mediaBox.upperRight = (x3, x4)
            p.mediaBox.lowerLeft = (x1, x6)

            q.mediaBox.upperRight = (x3, x6)
            q.mediaBox.lowerLeft = (x1, x2)


        p.artBox = p.mediaBox
        p.bleedBox = p.mediaBox
        p.cropBox = p.mediaBox

        q.artBox = q.mediaBox
        q.bleedBox = q.mediaBox
        q.cropBox = q.mediaBox

        output.addPage(q)
        output.addPage(p)

    output.write(dst_f)
    src_f.close()
    dst_f.close()

Answer 5

You can use a Python library called PyPDF. This function will split double pages no matter what the page orientation is:

import copy
import math
import pyPdf

def split_pages(src, dst):
    src_f = file(src, 'r+b')
    dst_f = file(dst, 'w+b')

    input = pyPdf.PdfFileReader(src_f)
    output = pyPdf.PdfFileWriter()

    for i in range(input.getNumPages()):
        p = input.getPage(i)
        q = copy.copy(p)
        q.mediaBox = copy.copy(p.mediaBox)

        x1, x2 = p.mediaBox.lowerLeft
        x3, x4 = p.mediaBox.upperRight

        x1, x2 = math.floor(x1), math.floor(x2)
        x3, x4 = math.floor(x3), math.floor(x4)
        x5, x6 = math.floor(x3/2), math.floor(x4/2)

        if x3 > x4:
            # horizontal
            p.mediaBox.upperRight = (x5, x4)
            p.mediaBox.lowerLeft = (x1, x2)

            q.mediaBox.upperRight = (x3, x4)
            q.mediaBox.lowerLeft = (x5, x2)
        else:
            # vertical
            p.mediaBox.upperRight = (x3, x4)
            p.mediaBox.lowerLeft = (x1, x6)

            q.mediaBox.upperRight = (x3, x6)
            q.mediaBox.lowerLeft = (x1, x2)

        output.addPage(p)
        output.addPage(q)

    output.write(dst_f)
    src_f.close()
    dst_f.close()

Answer 6

With mupdf-1.8-windows-x64, in win10 CMD, you need to have 'poster ' (followed by space and without quotes) before the horizontal parameter (-x ). For example for a double-paged scan to PDF:

mutool poster -x 2 -y 1 C:\Users\alfie\Documents\SNM\The_Ultimate_Medicine.pdf C:\Users\alfie\Documents\ebooks\The_Ultimate_Medicine.pdf

What a wonderful tool! Merci infiniment !.. (and the output file ~9MB is only 52KB bigger than the original!)