I came into the requirement of needing to split the pages of a pdf in half, normally this is required when you scan a book and have two pages per scan, but my specific example was a Lonely Planet digital publication which for some reason was released similarly, as I wanted to view it on a Kindle I required single pages only.
My first trial was free software Briss, Java coded cross-platform, I did not find it intuitive at all and couldn’t get it to work, there was no way to select exactly half of the sheet, and no batch functionality.
I then moved to Page Cut by A-PDF, A-PDF have an interesting offer called “Blog it and get it” where you blog about the software and they give you a free license, hence this post, hopefully it pulls through.
Page Cut is extremely easy to use, the steps to split a page in half are;
- Open pdf with Page Cut
- Click Add a Vertical Line from the toolbar
- Click Apply with default settings
- Click Cut and Save As
That’s it you have a single page per page pdf.
Batch Cut Mode is even easier;
- Import pdf with Page Cut
- Select Cut Vertical In Half
- Click Cut and Save As
So what is Page Cut missing?
I would like to see some smarts; mainly for batch cuts, warnings if cuts go through words (or there isn’t enough blank white space).
The other thing needed is a column showing if the pdf is Landscape or Portait, with the option to select/deselect either. In general a landscape page will have two pages per page, a portrait page can be ignored.
As I needed this functionality, I wrote a little VB function that finds the page orientation, it does require Acrobat though. I could then filter and move to a separate folder landscape orientated pdfs to be imported into Page Cut, here’s the code;
Public Function getOrientation(ByRef gPDFPath As String) As String
If LenB(gPDFPath) > 0 Then
Dim acroApp, avDoc, pdDoc, pdPage
Dim acroPoint
Dim x As Long, y As Long
Set acroApp = CreateObject("AcroExch.App")
If acroApp.GetNumAVDocs = 0 Then 'no existing files
acroApp.Hide
End If
Set avDoc = CreateObject("AcroExch.AVDoc")
If avDoc.Open(gPDFPath, "Accessing PDF's") Then
If Not avDoc.IsValid Then
getOrientation = "Error"
Exit Function
End If
Set pdDoc = avDoc.GetPDDoc()
Set pdPage = avDoc.GetPDDoc.AcquirePage(0) 'first page
Set acroPoint = pdPage.GetSize()
x = acroPoint.x
y = acroPoint.y
Set acroPoint = Nothing
If x >= y Then
getOrientation = "Landscape"
Else
getOrientation = "Portrait"
End If
End If
pdDoc.Close
avDoc.Close True
' If acroApp.GetNumAVDocs > 0 Then
' acroApp.CloseAllDocs
' End If
acroApp.Exit
Set acroApp = Nothing
Set avDoc = Nothing
Set pdDoc = Nothing
Set pdPage = Nothing
End If
End Function
Finally, on my search for the above functionality I tried A-PDF Explorer, what I noticed was a second folder in my Program Files and Start menu, given A-PDF make a large amount of tools, why not have a root folder A-PDF, with subfolders for each product, makes more sense.