How to Split a PDF on Linux — Browser Tool and pdftk/pdfseparate
Split PDFs on Linux using a browser tool or command-line tools like pdftk and pdfseparate. Extract any page range from the terminal.
Split PDFs on Linux in seconds — use FixMyPDF's browser tool for quick extractions, or pdftk/pdfseparate for command-line workflows.
Method 1: Browser-Based Splitting
Open your browser on Linux. Go to fixmypdf.in/tools/split. Upload your PDF. Enter the page range to extract. Click "Split PDF". Download the extracted pages. No installation, works on all distros.
Method 2: pdftk Page Extraction
Extract pages 3 to 7: pdftk input.pdf cat 3-7 output extracted.pdf. Extract a single page: pdftk input.pdf cat 5 output page5.pdf. Install pdftk with sudo apt install pdftk on Debian/Ubuntu.
Method 3: pdfseparate (Poppler)
pdfseparate splits into individual pages: pdfseparate input.pdf page_%d.pdf. This creates page_1.pdf, page_2.pdf, etc. For a page range: pdfseparate -f 3 -l 7 input.pdf page_%d.pdf. Install via sudo apt install poppler-utils.
Extracting Non-Contiguous Pages with pdftk
pdftk handles non-sequential page extraction: pdftk input.pdf cat 1 3 5 7 output odd-pages.pdf extracts pages 1, 3, 5, and 7 into one PDF. Useful for extracting alternating pages from a double-sided scan.
Splitting Into Equal Parts
To split a 40-page PDF into four 10-page chunks: pdftk input.pdf cat 1-10 output part1.pdf, then cat 11-20 output part2.pdf, etc. Or use a shell loop for more than a few parts.
Browser Tool for Visual Workflows
When you need to see page thumbnails before deciding which pages to extract, the browser tool at FixMyPDF is faster than CLI. You can visually identify the right page numbers before entering the range.
Large PDFs on Linux Servers
For server-side PDF splitting (e.g. splitting incoming PDFs in a data pipeline), pdftk or pdfseparate are the right tools. They handle very large files efficiently in headless environments without requiring a display.
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