What tool is best for removing pages from a PDF

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I have a set of PDF documents that each have a few extra pages. I'd like to remove the first two and last pages from each of them. Preview only lets me look at and annotate a PDF, not edit one. Can anyone recommend a (free/freeware) tool to do this? I'm using 10.5 PPC so that does limit some of my options. Command line or GUI is fine.

Ok, in Preview it seems I can delete pages by hitting ⌘⌫ on the thumbnails, but it will then not give me the option to save. I can then try printing the altered document to PDF, but I am leery of this because I don't want to loose any metadata (I have to double-check all the files to see how much metadata there is if I decide on this course).

Just tried Acrobat at work, that doesn't work. The files are mod-protected by a password.

Best Answer

For the command-line I can recommend:

pdftk, the PDF Toolkit (for the Snow-Leopard installer you can try Pacifist to get the binaries or use the older version)

Merge PDF Documents

Split PDF Pages into a New Document

Rotate PDF Pages or Documents

…

If your PDF is edit-protected, you may want to try qpdf (via e.g. homebrew) to remove the restrictions first.

QPDF is a command-line program that does structural, content-preserving transformations on PDF files. It could have been called something like pdf-to-pdf. It also provides many useful capabilities to developers of PDF-producing software or for people who just want to look at the innards of a PDF file to learn more about how they work.

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