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April 20, 2008
Extracting Non-sequential Pages from PDFs
I received this email recently from a paralegal:
My colleague and I have been trying to extract non-sequential pages from a document to create a new document. It appears in the current version of Acrobat Professional (8.1.2) that only sequential documents can be extracted. Is there a work around for this? As an example, in a 100 page document we want to extract pages 12, 43 and 97 only. The ‘extract pages’ option (Document—>Extract Pages) indicates it will extract pages 12-97 which is way more pages than we need.
Yes, it's true that you cannot select and extract a discontinuous range of pages using the Extract Pages option and the Pages Panel.
However, you can drag and drop a non-sequential bunch of pages between two PDFs using the Pages Panel:
Read on for instructions and screen shots. Are you a really visual person? I've also included a movie that shows you how!
April 15, 2008
Creating a Non-Searchable PDF from Office Documents
Every once in a while, I receive an email that has me scratching my head a bit, such as this one:
When you PDF a document that you generate in MS Word, is there a way to produce an "image-only" PDF, with non-searchable text? The only way I know how is to print out and scan the document back into Acrobat.
Why would someone want to take a perfectly good, fully-searchable document and turn it into an image-only PDF which is just a picture of the page in a PDF wrapper?
The answer is that in the course of vigorously defending a client, some firms desire to make using documents as difficult as possible for the other side.
Of the various PDF flavors , an image-only PDF is . . .
- 3 to 5 times larger in file size
- Look worse on screen
- Print slower
- Not searchable
"Dumbing down" a PDF to an image probably doesn't cripple the other side very much. Using OCR, the other side can quickly make the document searchable.
It is not without some trepidition that I share this tip. After all, compact, searchable PDF should be what we all aspire to create.
However, since I suspect that many firms are printing out documents and rescanning them, I want to offer a greener alternative.
It's not for me to comment on whether this is fair game or not as you work with the other side, but following is a workaround that will create an image-only, non-searchable PDF from an existing PDF document.