Split PDF Files The Wise Way

PDF Splitter is good news when you want to extract PDF pages out of a very large document. It is packed with the essential abilities to chop your PDF files or to delete pages out of them.

PDF Splitter helps you solve the problem of splitting multi-page PDF files. It offers a wide range of extraction possibilities and carries out the job with high quality results.

The application is released under a trial license. You can use it for 30 days without any other limitations. After this period, if you find the application worthwhile, you will have to buy it for $29.95 in order to keep using it.

The interface of the application is pretty simple, divided into two panels. The lower one allows you to search for the documents you wish to process. The all-time popular Drag & Drop function is not available, nor does the application feature an “Add files” button; instead, you can hit the “Search button,” that will lead you to select the folder that contains your files; after the PDF files are listed, you can manually select the ones you need to split. By right clicking the main interface, you will get a menu that allows you to select all the listed files.

The “Advanced Options” tab that is located in the lower panel of the main interface claims that it will search your files by date or by size, but no matter how hard you try to make it work, it just keeps failing in listing the files according to your search terms. In other words, you should know that it’s a feature that doesn’t do its job.

Let’s concentrate on the main function of the application, splitting PDF files. As soon as you select the documents of interest, you can press the “Split” button and customize the way your files will be processed.

The application offers you three different ways to split PDFs: the first, and the simplest of all is to split by pages, meaning that at the end of the process, you will end up with a number of PDF files equal to the number of pages your PDF had originally. The second option is to split your PDF into groups of a certain number of pages, of your own choice; that translates into to the fact that you can specify how many files will result from the original one. Last, but not least, the cherry on top of the cake, you will find that you can chop an exact number of pages out of it, you can literally extract the desired page range from any PDF file.

Not only do you get all of the above, but you will also be able to define a file name pattern. This feature allows you to name the result files in two different manners. One of them can build a name based on the original title of the document plus a phrase of your choice, plus the page number. The second one is a more personalized type of pattern, allowing you to choose the name of the PDFs yourself, preceded by the page number.

For the Output Settings, you can either check the “Save at Current Location” box, meaning that the result documents are going to be placed in the same folder as the original ones, or you can manually select a folder to host the documents. Naturally, most users will check the “Open folder after splitting” box too, but the application will fail to do so whatsoever.

The complementary functions of the software, built to allow you to personalize your PDF files even more, are the Append and Delete pages features. Normally, when you hit the append button, you’d expect to attach a file to the existing PDF. That’s not the case here. In fact, the append function will glue the original PDF file to another document in PDF format, of your own choice. So, in other words, you get to join one or more PDF files. The software makes it possible for you to attach other PDFs either at the end of the original document, or inside it, at a page number of your choosing.

An appealing feature of the application is that entire pages from your PDF documents can be erased with the aid of the “Delete pages” function. You will certainly appreciate the fact that you can just make a page inside your document disappear like magic.

The application also comes with an Export function. Users will be provided with the options of exporting documents to a location of their choice or to an Excel spreadsheet that will ultimately preserve basic details of the PDF documents.

The Preferences window of the software allows you to select the grid items that you want to remain visible in the main window, although it is stated that the “Selected” and “Pages” columns are compulsory, for obvious reasons.

One aspect that deserves being brought to light is that the splitting process will take a relatively short amount of time. Although there is no time estimation feature and the progress bar always remains empty (even at the end of the splitting process), you will be satisfied with the amount of time that the application requires to process documents.

A downside of PDF Splitter is that it uses too many system resources. During splitting a document of almost 1000 hundred pages large, the CPU values climbed up to 45 %, taking up to 150 MB of RAM, which is a bit too much for this kind of application (tested on Athlon 4200+ with 2GB RAM).