I wanted a freeware editor mainly for splitting multiple pages up into individual pages. This looked like a good one, but I can’t seem to install it. I downloaded the file, but there doesn’t seem to be a .exe file, and the instructions on their web page are almost non-existent. It says to open a command line, but how does one do that?
I’m on Windows XP.
I should add that if I click on the pdftk file (can’t tell what type of file it is) I do get what looks like DOS screen, but it disappears after a few seconds.
Pdftk is a set of commandline tools for editing and processing PDFs. There’s no GUI, but others have built GUI frontends for it for various platforms. I’m sure you can find one for Windows if you look around, though I don’t know any off-hand.
If you want to use it directly, you’ll need to open a DOS window (or whatever it’s called on XP), by going to Start -> Run and typing ‘cmd’.
Yes, it’s very easy to use, provided you’re willing to take a few minutes to read the instructions, and provided you already know the rudiments of the command line (at a minimum, how to specify paths, how to change the current working directory, and how to quote filenames with special characters). I would definitely recommend pdftk for both simple and advanced processing of PDF files. It can easily do what you’re trying to do (split a PDF into single pages) with a single command:
pdftk in.pdf burst output out%02d.pdf
Where “in.pdf” is the name of the input file. The output files will be named out01.pdf, out02.pdf, etc.
If you’re not already familiar with the command line, perhaps there are other free PDF processor out there which can do this from a graphical environment. But you’d probably spend less time learning the command line skills you need for this particular task than it takes to find, download, and install a different processor.
I like the price, but it looks like the download is being flagged by McAfee as having a virus. Could be a false positive, but I’m not taking the chance until they clear it up.
There is freeware (or near freeware at least) called iText and iTextSharp. I use the iTextSharp all the time for manipulating PDF files. iText works with Java and iTextSharp works with C#.
You can do a lot of things with both. They are relatively easy to learn, but way overkill for little stuff.
I was interested in this for forms that allow you to fill them but don’t allow you to save them (only print them) as new pdf files. So after reading this thread I did download pdftk. Aside from creating an utterly arcane directory structure, its documentation is in one of those unreadable BN formats that I, at least, find unusable. There is not one example of how to actually use it.