Tech Tips – PDFSAM


Tech Tips / Friday, April 13th, 2012

From time to time, while I’m preparing for a lesson, I come across a PDF with things I’d like to use for class. However, the problem is that the PDF is ten pages long and I only need a page or two out of it. I certainly could just print the thing and use only the pages I need, but I prefer to save a bit of money at the print shop. To do this, I need to cut the pages out of the PDF that I need. Since I can’t afford the Adobe PDF programs, I searched for a free option and I came across “PDF Split and Merge” (http://www.pdfsam.org/).

PDFSAM does exactly what it’s title suggests, it splits and merges PDFs simply and quickly. And since it’s open source, it’s completely free. It can be run on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

It isn’t the prettiest interface but it does the job. All you need to do is choose the right action from the left side bar, open the file(s) you want to alter, choose your settings and then choose “Run.” This will take care of your desired actions.

A quick rundown of the actions. Alternate mix allows you to alternating swap pages between one or two PDFs. Merge/Extract allows you to remove individual pages from a PDF. Rotate lets you rotate pages from landscape to portrait and vice versa. Split allows you to cut a PDF file into two parts. Visual document composer allows you to merge PDFs and choose the order of the pages in the merged file. Visual reorder allows you to rearrange the pages in a PDF.

So, I hope that helps and you end up saving a bit of money here and there by cutting back on printing costs.

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