How to automate page extraction from PDF using AppleScript and Acrobat Pro?

Question

I'm new to AppleScript, but I'm trying to create a script that will go through all the PDF files in a folder that extracts pages into separate files. My plan is to use a combination of Automator and AppleScript.

My AppleScript so far:

tell application "Adobe Acrobat Pro" open theFile set numPages to (count active doc each page) --execute the extraction here end tell 

The command in Acrobat Pro is under Options > Extract Pages... , where I can specify a range of pages and extract them to separate the files. However, I cannot find a way to do this using the Acrobat Pro dictionary in AppleScript.

There is an execute command that executes a menu item, but I cannot make it work (I am also not sure about the use of syntax, i.e. execute "Options:Extract Pages..." ?). Any help on this?

Answer 1

I think you can do this completely with Automator without the need for AppleScript or Adobe software. The PDF to Images action splits a multi-page .PDF file into separate .PDF files, one per page:

Answer 2

You can use Adobe Acrobat Pro. Here is an example using Adobe Acrobat Pro XI. It uses Acrobat "Actions" (formerly called "Batch Processing") with custom JavaScript.

Adobe Acrobat Pro - Change Action

You can create a new action, prompting the user to select a folder of pdf files for processing. You can then add JavaScript execution that looks for PDF and extractPages file names to extract all pages from PDF

Adobe Acrobat Pro - JavaScript

Next, all pages will be extracted into separate PDF files. It adds a suffix at the end with each sheet number. It fills the sheet number with zeros based on the method described in the links, which basically adds a bunch of zeros in front, and then only fragments to take as many last digits of the string as you like, depending on how many sheets you usually have.

 /* Extract Pages to Folder */ var re = /.*\/|\.pdf$/ig; var filename = this.path.replace(re,""); { for ( var i = 0; i < this.numPages; i++ ) this.extractPages ({ nStart: i, nEnd: i, cPath : filename + "_s" + ("000000" + (i+1)).slice (-3) + ".pdf" }); }; 

References

JavaScript for Acrobat API Reference> JavaScript API> Doc> Doc Methods> extractPages

Extract pages for a separate PDF (is there something wrong with the loop?)

How to create a Zerofilled value using JavaScript?

How to output integers with leading zeros in JavaScript [duplicate]