Tuesday, April 05, 2011
Splitting PDFs
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Had a bit of a change today. There's a report that produced weekly at work, as a PDF file, for all our projects. Basically a highlight/checkpoint report. Problem is that there's hundreds of projects and we don't want project managers to have to go through the whole list to find the one or two pages that impact them (they just won't). We were looking to split the file by project so each project manager would only have to look at the reports for their own project. Fortunately each project is bookmarked in the PDF so we had something we could split on.
I was tasked with finding a suitable product. After looking at a few dozen I finally settled on A-PDF Split. I particularly liked the way you can control the output filenames with macros.
NitroPDF was a close second but cost a lot more, fine if you want the extra functionality (it does more than split) but we didn't need that, and didn't have such good control on the output filenames. The majority of the other products were total 'dog with three legs', many just didn't work at all or threw up loads of errors. A-PDF Split does what we need and doesn't cost much. There's also a command line version for if you need to do offline batch processing, but there's no trial version of that so I couldn't try it. ¶ 15:31
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Had a bit of a change today. There's a report that produced weekly at work, as a PDF file, for all our projects. Basically a highlight/checkpoint report. Problem is that there's hundreds of projects and we don't want project managers to have to go through the whole list to find the one or two pages that impact them (they just won't). We were looking to split the file by project so each project manager would only have to look at the reports for their own project. Fortunately each project is bookmarked in the PDF so we had something we could split on.
I was tasked with finding a suitable product. After looking at a few dozen I finally settled on A-PDF Split. I particularly liked the way you can control the output filenames with macros.
NitroPDF was a close second but cost a lot more, fine if you want the extra functionality (it does more than split) but we didn't need that, and didn't have such good control on the output filenames. The majority of the other products were total 'dog with three legs', many just didn't work at all or threw up loads of errors. A-PDF Split does what we need and doesn't cost much. There's also a command line version for if you need to do offline batch processing, but there's no trial version of that so I couldn't try it. ¶ 15:31
The above is the work and opinions of Reverend Stephen Booth as a private individual. © Stephen Booth 2004, 2005 &c.
