If you ever need to save all the pages of an InDesign document as separate files, you can use a free script called ExtractPages. The script was originally written by Eddy and Loic Aigon and updated by Kasyan Servetsky. You can download it from Kasyan’s site here.
The script provides two features that InDesign’s Move Pages command (Layout > Pages > Move Pages) lacks: First, it can quickly spit out a series of single-page INDD files from the page range you enter, just like the Extract Pages command in Adobe Acrobat. Just turn on the appropriate checkbox in the script’s simple dialog box:
Second, the script can create new InDesign files on the fly from the pages you extract – InDesign’s Move Pages command can only move or copy pages from one InDesign doc to another one, not to a new one.
So, ExtractPages is handy script to have if, say, you’ve got a long multi-chapter book in a single InDesign document that you want to quickly split into multiple InDesign files, one document per chapter. This is something you need to do if you want to export a book to ePub and have the chapters start on their own pages, for example.
It’s possible to use Move Pages to do this manually (just set up a starter InDesign file for each chapter beforehand), but that means you have to laboriously match page dimensions and other attributes, and then remember to delete the additional, superfluous starter page in each of those files afterwards. You don’t need to bother with that if you use the script.
Warning: ExtractPages has one weirdness that can throw you: Not only doesn’t it automatically open the new INDD file(s) it creates, it closes the source document as soon as you run the script. If there were unsaved changes, they’re gone. So if you want to use it, be sure to save your source document first.
This article was last modified on June 20, 2025
This article was first published on March 4, 2010
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