March 2009 Archives

I had to fix some issues of my initial 0.1 release that bugged me. First off there is now the possibility to start pdf.quicksplit without a filename. It then shows a FileDialog in which you can specify a PDF file to split. It's also possible to right-click on a PDF file an select "Open with" -> Browse -> (select the pdf.quicksplit.exe). You can see this on the new screenshots.

There are two other fixes:
- if there are already temporary files: ask the user if we should delete them
- show error dialog if user selects a pdf file with only 1 page (or if there was an error while extracting pages - e.g. corrupt PDF file)

And there's one annoying bug (under windoze) left which I don't know how to fix: if pdf.quicksplit.exe is put in a path which contains spaces it doesn't find the other exe-tools (like pdftk.exe, ...).

The new version can be downloaded here:

PDF QuickSplit v0.2 Source Code
PDF QuickSplit v0.2 Linux Version
PDF QuickSplit v0.2 Windoze Version

Btw: if you want to help improve pdf.quicksplit please contact me (email is in the source and perhaps it's best to transfer the source to sourceforge or sth. similar before we start coding in different directions ;).

Some days ago I wanted to finish (read: "bring it in an usable state ;) a project which I started some months ago: a program for splitting PDF files. I know that there are many programs out there which can do this but I searched hours for a program which serves the purpose of splitting a PDF in a fast way by showing you a preview of the pages. So PDF QuickSplit isn't able to automatically split a PDF file into single pages or on every N pages (you can accomplish this much easier by using something like

for i in `seq 1 1 15`; do pdftk input.pdf cat ${i}-${i} output output.${i}-${i}.pdf; done;

or using GUI for PDFTK).
PDF QuickSplit is for users who have one of those fancy ADF scanners and just put a bunch of documents on it which get put into a single PDF file. The GUIs I saw are very discomforting when I try to split the PDF file into the single documents because some of them only have one page, some have a double page and finally there are multiple pages which you want to keep into one file. So you need an easy tool to set cut-markers. For that you need a window with a preview of the PDF pages. And that's exactly what PDF QuickSplit does (under Windoze and Linux):

A final word: the state of the program is something like an alpha1 (or as KDE developers would call it: v4.2.1 rock-stable without bugs... - but that's another story...). The code is pretty ugly (static char[] stuff etc) - so it's main purpose is to show programmers how _not_ to code ;) But you are free to send me patches... The following downloads include the source code which can be compiled on linux and windoze (dependencies: gtk, pdftk, ghostscript, imagemagick - for windoze you need the mingw-versions), the linux binary and the windoze binary with it's dependencies. So finally here are the downloads:

PDF QuickSplit v0.1 Source Code
PDF QuickSplit v0.1 Linux Version
PDF QuickSplit v0.1 Windoze Version (with all necessary dlls)

And if you like my program soooo much that you need to buy an ADF scanner immediately (or something else ;) from Amazon please click on the following link to support me :)