Monday, February 17, 2014

PDF Split and Merge (PDFsam), free tool to split, merge, extract, rotate, reorder pages in PDF files

If you want to extract a few pages from a PDF file to another PDF file, or you want to insert a few PDF pages (such as the cover page) into an existing PDF file, what tool will you use to accomplish that?

There are several commercial tools available, which require you to buy a license. There are also several shareware tools and online tools which imposed a lot of limitation to the PDF file, such as with an accepted maximum page of a small number only.

I am using a free tools with the open source GPL2 license to do this. It is called PDF Split and Merge (PDFsam) Basic, developed by an Italian guy Andrea Vacondio and his team.

PDF Split and Merge Basic is able to:

  • Split your PDF documents (into chapters, single pages, etc.).
  • Merge many PDF documents or subsections of them.
  • Extract sections of your document into a single PDF document.
  • Mix alternate pages taken from two PDF documents in straight or reverse order into a single document.
  • Rotate pages of the selected PDF documents.
  • Visually reorder pages of a selected PDF document.
  • Visually compose a document dragging pages from selected PDF documents.
  • Save and load your workspace to automate your recurrent jobs.
  • Manage PDFsam settings and set a workspace to load at start up.
PDFsam is running on Java, and is cross-platform. You can run it on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and the developer has also created a trimmed down version called PDF Merge for Android.

It has a simple and clean user interface, making it pretty easy to use.


You can download PDFsam here: http://www.pdfsam.org/download/

There is also an Enhanced version of PDFsam, which the source code is available. The developer has requested for a donation of any amount, and he will provide you with the compiled executable file and installer.

The additional functions in PDFsam Enhanced version are:
  • Encrypt your PDF files (RC40 bits, RC128 bits, AES128 bits) and set permissions on them.
  • Add a PDF document as front page or addendum (or both) to your PDF documents.
  • Mix alternate pages taken from two PDF documents in straight or reverse order into a single document.
  • Extract attached files from a PDF document.
  • Decrypt your PDF files.
  • Set viewer options to tell the viewer application how should open the document.
  • Set the metadata of a document (author, title, subject and keywords).

6 comments:

Sunil said... Reply To This Comment

I would like to recommend user-friendly tool http://pdfutility.blogspot.com/2013/11/manage-your-large-sized-pdf-documents.html to split or even merge the PDF document files, as per your requirement. This application is easy to operate and provides different parameters to conduct PDF split or merge operations effectively.

Unknown said... Reply To This Comment

Take help of this tool http://www.splitpdffile.com to recover data from corrupted PDF files by splitting merging them with powerful tool. The software is also supported by all versions of PDF file and all windows operating systems.

Unknown said... Reply To This Comment

I use RE PDF SDK, which also supports PDF splitting and merging. Besides, the feature you mentioned are also included in it. It's as good as pdfsam, I hope it can also help someone need it.

Unknown said... Reply To This Comment

SystoTech PDF Split and Merge Tool is another good choice to split a large PDF file into parts or merge several PDF files into single PDF file. The PDF splitter merger is available free of cost for all users.

Eugen said... Reply To This Comment

Split multiple PDF files in a single processing
session. https://3steppdf.com/features-split.php

MartinSmith said... Reply To This Comment

Try Softaken PDF Champ

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