Extract Pages from a PDF File with a GUI Bash Script

Productivity Sauce

Every now and then I need to extract individual pages from PDF files. Usually, I use the following one-liner that does the trick:

pdftk A=foo.pdf cat A5-15 output pages_5-15.pdf

This command uses the pdftk toolkit to pull a range of pages (in this case, from 5 to 15) out of the specified PDF file (foo.pdf). Recently, though, I stumbled upon a handy Bash script that generates a simple graphical interface for extracting pages from a PDF file.

Although the script is posted on the Ask Ubuntu forum, it should work on any distribution that has any of the supported PDF utilities (qpdf, ghostscript, or cpdf) and the yad GUI tool installed. Copy and paste the script into a text file, and save it under the extract-pages.sh name. Make the script executable using the chmod +x extract-pages.sh command. Run the script in the terminal using the ./extract-pages.sh command followed by the path to the input PDF file (e.g., ./extract-pages.sh foo.pdf), specify the desired page range, select the back-end PDF processing tool, and hit OK.