pdf-tools-pages: Extract and delete pages in PDF documents

Overview

pdf-tools-pages extends pdf-tools, the Emacs PDF viewer, with page-level manipulation capabilities. While pdf-tools provides excellent support for viewing, annotating, and searching PDF documents, it does not offer built-in commands for structural operations such as extracting a subset of pages into a new file or removing unwanted pages from an existing document. pdf-tools-pages fills this gap.

The package provides a simple two-phase workflow: first, navigate through the PDF and toggle pages into a selection set using a single DWIM command; then, either extract the selected pages to a new PDF file or delete them from the current document. The selection is maintained per buffer, so you can work with multiple PDFs simultaneously without interference.

Under the hood, page manipulation is performed by qpdf, a mature command-line tool for structural, content-preserving transformations of PDF files. qpdf must be installed separately.

Installation

pdf-tools-pages requires Emacs 26.1 or later.

Dependencies

• pdf-tools 1.0 or later, installed and configured.
• qpdf, available on your system's PATH.

On macOS, you can install qpdf with Homebrew:

brew install qpdf

On Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install qpdf

package-vc (built-in since Emacs 30)

(package-vc-install "https://github.com/benthamite/pdf-tools-pages")

Elpaca

(use-package pdf-tools-pages
  :ensure (pdf-tools-pages :host github :repo "benthamite/pdf-tools-pages"))

straight.el

(straight-use-package
 '(pdf-tools-pages :type git :host github :repo "benthamite/pdf-tools-pages"))

Quick start

(use-package pdf-tools-pages
  :after pdf-tools
  :bind (:map pdf-view-mode-map
              ("C-c s" . pdf-tools-pages-select-dwim)))

Open a PDF, navigate to a page you want to select, and press C-c s. The command toggles the current page in the selection and automatically advances to the next page. Repeat for additional pages. Once your selection is complete, run M-x pdf-tools-pages-extract-selected-pages to save the selected pages to a new file, or M-x pdf-tools-pages-delete-selected-pages to remove them from the current document.

Documentation

For a comprehensive description of all user options, commands, and functions, see the manual.

License

pdf-tools-pages is licensed under the GPL-3.0.