PDF Extractor

A short and sweet script to read, decrypt and pull certain pages from a PDF. I was having to do this task often via a long winded process as I don't own a paid PDF editor that supports this functionality.

Usage

usage: extract.py [-h] [-s None] path pages

:param path: the path to the PDF file
:param pages: a string of comma and hyphen separated page numbers e.g. 1,3-6 == 1,3,4,5,6
:param suffix: the suffix to append to the filename when saving. If None, will use 'pages'.
:return: None

positional arguments:
  path                  The path of the PDF to take a subset of
  pages                 The pages in comma or hyphen-separated values

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -s None, --suffix None
                        The suffix to append to the save file

Examples

python3 extract.py some_doc.pdf 1,2,3
python3 extract.py some_doc.pdf 1-3
python3 extract.py some_doc.pdf 1,2,3-5 -s "somesuffix"

Alias

For speed of access, you can also alias this script depending on your OS.

Append the following to the end of your shell configuration profile file (.zshrc, .bashrc, etc.) and save:

alias pdfext="python3 extract.py"

You should then be able to run a more simplified command:

pdfext some_doc.pdf 1,2,3
pdfext some_doc.pdf 1-3
pdfext some_doc.pdf 1,2,3-5 -s "somesuffix"