Howto pdf¶

splitting pdf in ranges¶

qpdf is doing the job

qpdf really_large.pdf --pages . 1739-1987 -- really_large_section.pdf

but qpdf is lossless, so the size of the pdf stays basically unchanged.
To resize the pdf, let's rerender it and save only the needed content.

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -sOutputFile=really_large_section.pdf_small.pdf really_large_section.pdf

concat pdfs¶

either provide the name of each part directly

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=unified.pdf pdf-part1.pdf pdf-part2.pdf

alternatively have all of them in a subdirectory presorted. The sequence of the file-listing equals the sequence within the new unified.pdf

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=unified.pdf ./pdf-parts/*.pdf