Extracting a page from PDF

November 28, 2020

We use the free Poppler tools instead of using Acrobat, despite having a license. Extracting one or more pages from a PDF file can be done with paid Adobe Acrobat. The free Adobe Reader or FoxIt Reader cannot extract pages. Adobe Acrobat is a large and cumbersome program that installs startup daemons that are not trivially disabled.

To extract pages 2 to 3 from in.pdf using Poppler:

pdfseparate -f 2 -l 3 in.pdf out.pdf

Note: you must leave a space after -f and -l as shown.

Poppler is installed by:

Linux: apt install poppler-utils
macOS: brew install poppler
Windows: use WSL poppler

An alternative to Poppler is GhostScript can also extract pages from PDF, but it’s a more complicated command:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dFirstPage=2 -dLastPage=3 -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER -dBATCH -sOutputFile=out.pdf in.pdf

Related: extract raw full-quality images from PDF