| Author: | Dinu Gherman <gherman@darwin.in-berlin.de> |
|---|---|
| Homepage: | http://www.dinu-gherman.net/ |
| Version: | Version 0.4.2 |
| Date: | 2008-09-17 |
| Copyright: | GNU Public Licence v3 (GPLv3) |
Pdfsplit (formally named pdfslice) is a Python command-line tool and module for splitting and rearranging pages of a PDF document. Using it you can pick single pages or ranges of pages from a PDF document and store them in a new PDF document. To do this you describe these pages with the simple Python slice notation, e.g. 0:10 for the first ten pages, -10:0 for the last ten pages, 0::2 for all even pages, -1::-1 for all pages in reversed order, etc.
Basically, pdfsplit wrapps pyPdf, a package written by Mathieu Fenniak which contains the needed functionality in its core, but does not provide a simple method of using it easily from the command-line or from a Python module.
You can use pdfsplit as a Python module e.g. like in the following interactive Python session (the function's signature might still change a bit in the future):
>>> from pdfsplit import splitPages
>>>
>>> splitPages("file.pdf", [slice(0, 1, None)]) # i.e. [0]
written: file-split.pdf
>>> splitPages("file.pdf", [slice(None, None, 2)]) # i.e. [::2]
written: file-split.pdf
In addition there is a script named pdfsplit, which can be used more easily from the system command-line like this (you can see many more examples when typing pdfsplit -h on the command-line):
$ pdfsplit 0 file.pdf written: file-split.pdf $ pdfsplit ::2 file.pdf written: file-split.pdf $ pdfsplit -p -o "%(base)s-p%(indices)s%(ext)s" 3-5 /path/file[12].pdf written: file1-p3-5.pdf written: file2-p3-5.pdf
There are two ways to install pdfsplit, depending on whether you have the easy_install command available on your system or not.
With the easy_install command on your system and a working internet connection you can install pdfsplit with only one command in a terminal:
$ easy_install pdfsplit
If the easy_install command is not available to you and you want to install it before installing pdfsplit, you might want to go to the Easy Install homepage and follow the instructions there.
Alternatively, you can install the pdfsplit tarball after downloading the file pdfsplit-0.4.0.tar.gz and decompressing it with the following command:
$ tar xfz pdfsplit-0.4.0.tar.gz
Then change into the newly created directory pdfsplit and install pdfsplit by running the following command:
$ python setup.py install
This will install a Python module file named pdfsplit.py in the site-packages subfolder of your Python interpreter and a script tool named pdfsplit in your bin directory, usually in /usr/local/bin.
Pdfsplit depends on pyPdf which, if missing, will miraculously be installed together with pdfsplit if you have a working internet connection during the installation procedure. If for whatever reason pyPdf cannot be installed, pdfsplit should still install fine. In this case you'll get a warning when trying to run pdfsplit.
The pdfsplit tarball distribution contains a Unittest test suite in the file test_pdfsplit.py which can be run like shown in the following lines on the system command-line:
$ tar xfz pdfsplit-0.4.0.tar.gz $ cd pdfsplit $ python test_pdfsplit.py written: samples/test-split.pdf .written: samples/test-split-0.pdf .written: samples/test-split-0..5.pdf .written: samples/test-odd.pdf .written: samples/test-reversed.pdf .... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 8 tests in 0.498s OK
Please report bugs and patches to Dinu Gherman <gherman@darwin.in-berlin.de>. Don't forget to include information about the operating system and Python versions being used.