Lee wrote:
My printer requires all my catalogues and booklets supplied as individuals PDF pages, which means I always have to generate them separately from InDesign.
I don’t suppose you know any way of automatically exporting a booklet as individual pages, do you? (I would be very popular with my design team here if I could find a way to do this!)
I love helping people become popular with their design teams!
You can easily split a multiple page PDF into individual pages in Acrobat 9, which came out almost a year ago. If you haven’t upgraded to version 9 yet, read this post (and its comments) for some other third-party solutions. To export individual PDF pages out of InDesign you might try the Page Exporter Utility script that David wrote about a couple years ago. But personally, I like to review a PDF as a single document in Acrobat before splitting it up, instead of opening up individual page PDFs to make sure everything came through. It’s up to you.
Split A PDF in Acrobat 9
Start by exporting the layout to a single PDF from InDesign as you normally would, with whatever settings your output provider requires. Be sure to export the document as single pages (don’t turn on the Spreads checkbox) and turn on Marks/Bleeds as necessary.
Open the PDF in Acrobat 9 and choose Document > Split Document:
In the Split Document dialog box, the default “Max pages” amount is 2, so change that to 1. (Note another handy tool in the Split Document feature set: instead of splitting up a PDF by page number, you could divvy it up into logical sections via bookmarks. I’ve used that for long PDF files before, to make it easier for people to download chapters of a book. But that’s for another post.)
Click the Output Options button to specify how you want Acrobat to name the single-page PDFs and where it should save them. I usually create a new folder to hold everything, so I select Specific Folder and then the Choose button.
Click the OK button to confirm your options and close this dialog box, and then click the OK button in the Split Document dialog box to do the split. In milliseconds, your file is split up into the individual PDFs you need. Here are the results of splitting up a 12-page catalog using “Pg” as the label:
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on March 4, 2009
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