How to extract pages from PDF on iPad with a-Shell and pdfrw

News » How to extract pages from PDF on iPad with a-Shell and pdfrw

Posted on 05 Jan 2022 16:42

Using a-Shell and pdfrw

Following this previous tutorial Using youtube-dl on iPad I’ve installed pdfrw, a Python library and utility that reads and writes PDF files.

It came with a lot of examples that let you modify metadata, create booklet, rotate pages, extract pages, add watermark and more. To extract pages I’ve downloaded the subset.py example.

1. Install a-Shell from App Store
2. Open a-Shell and run the command pip install —upgrade pip to update pip to last version
3. Install pdfrw with pip install pdfrw
4. Move to a-Shell home folder with cd ~/Documents
5. Create bin subfoler with mkdir bin
6. Download subset.py to bin subfolder

Usage: subset.py my.pdf page[range] [page[range]] …
eg. subset.py my.pdf 1-3 5 7-9
It creates subset.my.pdf file with pages 1,2,3,5,7,8,9.
You can use other examples to modify your PDFs as you like.

Using Files app

1. Open the PDF and tap the share icon
2. Select Print
3. Tap Range and specify the starting and end pages. Then you can swipe and check the page thumbnail to create a custom range.
4. Tap Print.
5. Select Save to Files. It will make a new PDF with just the selected pages and save it.

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