Extract Parts of PDFs With Preview

You can extract pages and parts of pages from a PDF using a variety of different techniques on your Mac in Preview. One is so easy it almost isn't worth mentioning the others.

Video Transcript:  Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can extract parts of a PDF document into a new one. 
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 2000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/Patreon. There you could read more about it. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts. 
 Now let's say you have a large PDF document and you want to take just individual pages from it and make a new smaller document. Or perhaps you just want to take parts of a page and make a new document from that. So I have this example document here. If I double click it it opens up in Preview, the default app for handling PDF's. If I turn On thumbnails I can see it just has got seven pages. But let's say I want to extract only three of those into a separate document. A simple way to do this is to duplicate the document first and delete the pages you don't want. So I'm going to select the file here in the Finder and if I choose File and then Duplicate, or simply use the keyboard shortcut Command D, I have a second copy of it. Let me open up that second copy. 
So let's delete the pages I don't want. Since I have the thumbnails showing here on the left I can just select a page by clicking it and then press the Delete Key and it deletes that page. I can select a range by clicking on one and then Command Click another. So I have these two pages selected. If I press Delete it gets rid of those. Let's get rid of one more page here like that and now if I Save with just Command S or File, Save then I saved it and those pages should be gone. Let's close it and take a look. This original document here is 3.5 MB. This new version is 2.9 MB. I got rid of one of the two pages that had an image on it. Those images take up most of the space. 
Another way to do this is using Copy and Paste. So let me open the document again. This time I'm going to select the pages I do want to keep. So I've got the first ones selected. Let me Command Click and select the third page and Command Click and select the sixth page. I could have used Shift to select a range. So I just have those three pages selected. I can now go to Edit and Copy or just use Command C. Now I can go to File and notice the first item is New From Clipboard, or Command N. If I use that I get a new untitled document with just those three pages. I can use File, Save or Command S and I can save this new one here. Let's close both of those and we know what the size of this one is. This one here is much smaller, 1.2 MB. So I definitely cut out the larger image in terms of size and a few other pages as well. 
Now let me show you another method that is even easier than those. If you open this up in Preview and have the sidebar here you can drag any individual page into the Finder and it will create a New Document for that page. So, for instance, let's drag page  2 just out here to the Finder. It could be to a Finder window or to the Desktop. It's going to create this new version. It is going to use the same name but attach parentheses dragged to the name. If I look at this file it's just the one page here. You see all that is there. Of course this is very small. This page doesn't even have an image on it so it's tiny. Now you can use this to easily export lots of different pages. So I can drag this page out. I can drag this page out. I can drag this page out. You can see now I've got three different documents, each from a different page. But you can also select multiple pages. I'm going to select this first page here and I'm going to Shift Click to select the range, 1 through 3, and Command Click to select page 6 as well. So these four pages. If I drag now it's going to drag all four pages out. When I look at this document you can see it's got those four pages. So this is, by far, the easiest method to quickly create a new PDF document with only the pages you want. 
Now let's say instead of extracting full pages from the PDF you only want to extract a portion of a page. So in Preview you could do that when you open it up, go to the page where you want to extract something, go to Tools and choose Rectangular Selection. Then you can just select an area. I'm just going to select the top here. With that selected you can go to Edit, Copy or Command C. Then go to File and then New From Clipboard. This will create a new PDF that just has that selection in there. You can see there's just this one page here with just that section. 
Now there is a little bit of a problem with this. You can see here it is just text so you would think that now this is going to be a pretty small PDF. Let me go ahead and Save it and I'm going to Save it as just Text, like that. Then I'm going to go and get info for this file. You can see it is 632 K, which seems pretty big. In fact if I were to drag and drop this first page out and create a document of just the first page you can see that that is 632 K. So what's happening here is this document actually includes everything on the first page, BUT is cropped to only show you the section that you want. This is probably done because PDF pages are complex and there's a lots of instructions with overlapping elements. So, Preview is just keeping it simple by taking the entire page and cropping it. So this image here, which takes up a lot of space, is actually included in this document even though you can't see it. You would think there would be a way to get around this. Like maybe if you go to File, and Print and try to print just that text there as a PDF and export it like that. Then it certainly looks a lot different. You can see it puts it on a whole page. But it is the same size. So that image is still in there even though it is not being shown. You would think that using the Markup Tools and then putting a square over this, let's make this square white and then let's get rid of the border there. Now you can see I've basically marked this out. Now if I try to export it you would think, well, it doesn't have the image anymore. But in fact this is still the same size. It's a little bit bigger because it includes that square.now. 
But there is a way to do this using the Redaction Tool. It's under Tools here. You can see there's Text Selection, Rectangular Selection, and Redact. So the first thing we want to do is extract this page. So I'm going to drag it out. Then I'm going to open up this New Document that just has this one page in it. Then I'm going to go to Tools, Redact and I'm going to dismiss the warning. Draw around this and redact that section. Now I'm going to Save this and when I check this document here it's now tiny. 30K. So by saving it with the redaction on it has actually removed the item there. Now if I don't want to see that black box there I can now, after I've saved it the first time, go into the Markup Tools and I can draw this rectangle over it and make it white to match the background there and when I Save you could see I now get the document that just is missing that piece there and is fairly small in size. 
Now there is no real easy way to extract sections and build a PDF document from those sections. You can do it if you really need to. So the way I would do that there is I would use the Rectangular Selection Tool and I would grab a piece. So I'll just grab, say, this piece here. I will do Command C to copy and create New From Clipboard. So this is my new document here. Then I'm going to go to another section. So let's say this section right here and I'll select another Rectangular area and I'll do Command C. Now there's no way for me to paste this in here. But I can go and create another New Document from the Clipboard and with the thumbnails on for each one of these I can drag from one to the other, like that. You can see now I've combined these two sections in this one document and I can Save this document. 
Now you have the same issue with a cropped version of a full page. But you can use that Redaction technique as an intermediate step. It's a lot of work but if it is something you don't do on a regular basis, you just need to do it for a particular document, then at least you know you can get it done. In fact the way I would do it is just simply select the thumbnails you want from the original document, drag them all to the Finder to create a new document from it, open that up, redact the areas that you want to get rid of and Save it. If you have to then Open it up again and put white boxes over the redactions. 
So there are a whole bunch of different techniques that you can use to create a new PDF from parts of an old one. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 12 Responses to “Extract Parts of PDFs With Preview”

Sheldon

1 month ago

Thanks bunches

Heidi FoCo

I do all of these things often enough but you definitely gave me more shortcuts AND REALLY addressed the storage issue.
I just love all you do here and podcast but this latest video is FANTASTIC!! Thank you!!

P Stillson

Another simple method for extracting parts of a PDF is to use Preview and Pages. First, open the PDF in Preview and use the rectangular selection tool to highlight the desired portion. Copy the selection, then open a new, blank Pages document and paste the copied content. You can now move, rearrange, and combine the pasted sections as needed. Once you're satisfied with the arrangement, export the Pages document as a PDF. The resulting PDF will retain the original resolution.

Jak G

Nice, thanks for pointing out the multi page select and drag to Finder option - very useful.

Alec James

Very useful. Thanks Gary

Kathy

I do this all the time and didn't know about creating by selecting and dragging. What a time saver - thanks!

Eric

3 weeks ago

Hi Gary.

Is there a technique for reducing the size of a resulting PDF when extracting a rectangular area from a large (39 MB) PDF that is a geographic map?

As you were describing in your video when I do an extract (select rectangular area, copy, then new from clipboard, save) the resulting file is the same size as the original file.

TIA

Hi Gary,

I have used Affinity Designer 2 to achieve the desired outcome. It would still be interesting if the same result could be obtained using Preview or other macOS 'standard' app.

Cheers

Dot

I want a VomBatu 5! And I promise to keep it dry after midnight. Seriously, I learned some useful new things from this video, and have learned much, much more from all your videos over the years I’ve been watching them. Thank you.

Gary Rosenzweig

Eric: You could try experimenting with the redact feature. Redact the parts you don't want. Then save. Then open the file again and copy the remaining section. See if that works.

Gary: I did try using the redact tool but it seems to be limited to dealing with text and not vectors.

Eric: It does work with images, but I didn't try vectors. I suppose that makes sense as curves can start and end at any point and it would be very difficult to recalculate them if one was erased. So I guess converting to an image like you mentioned is probably your best bet. Instead of using another app, you can try crop, new document, paste and then export as a jpg.

Extract Parts of PDFs With Preview

Comments: 12 Responses to “Extract Parts of PDFs With Preview”

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