How to 'Split or reorder' PDF

Split or reorder using the Switchboard

The Switchboard Action in the 'Arrange' group allows you to split your multi-page documents into smaller packages according to a split scheme, with an additional option to merge the individual packages back together again. You can also replace the original document with the newly derived "split and merged" document.

This Action can also be used inside a Process Plan. Within a Process Plan, the generated PDFs will be handled as separate output files (like e.g. images), so they will not be handled in further steps of the Process Plan.

In the example above, a 16 page document is being split into 2 packages. The first package contains 5 pages numbered 1 to 5 whereas the second package contains 7 pages from page number 10 to 16. A user can optionally check the 'Merge again' checkbox to merge the individual packages again, as done in this example.

Checking the 'Replace original' (can be activated only upon checking 'Merge again') will replace the original document which is now merged with the split scheme '1-5,10-16'.

Split Scheme expression may be a number with an asterisk "*" or a more complex string. If it is a number with an asterisk "*" it creates PDF files with the defined number of pages. E.g. if the number is 3*, it would create 3 packages with 3 pages and one package with one page from a 10 page file. An overview of the different split scheme expressions can be found in this article: Page selector and Split scheme.

Split or reorder in a Process Plan

With the 'Replace original' option of the 'Split or reorder' Action, it is possible to use one merged file as the new input file for the later steps since it replaces the original file.

Split PDF on the CLI

The --splitpdf command on the CLI allows you to split multi-page documents into smaller packages. You'll find a list of the full syntax in the following article: Commands related to Arrange – Split PDF

Reorder pages using QuickFix

There are two QuickFixes in pdfToolbox to reorder pages: