Manipulating pages in Acrobat X

Manipulating pages in Acrobat X

Steve Adler – October 12, 2010

Acrobat X has made it easier to access a number of useful tools for manipulating pages in PDF documents.

These tools are easily accessed in the new Tools panel and are located in the Pages section.In this video we will focus on the basics of manipulating pages with an emphasis on the use of the new Tools panel.So to rotate a page we'll click on the Rotate tool and for Direction, we can select the amount and direction of the rotations: Counterclockwise, Clockwise or 180 Degrees.For Pages, we can specify all the pages, or just certain pages.

You can specify even pages, odd pages, or both, and select the orientation of pages to be rotated.

I'll click OK and when I'm done I'll see my changes take place.To temporarily change your view of the page, you can use the menu bar to select View > Rotate View and select either clockwise or counter clockwise.

The original page orientation is restored the next time you open the PDF.To Delete a page or pages using the Tools menu, first click the Delete tool and when prompted select the range of pages that you want to delete.You can also use the Pages Navigation Pane over here on the left to first select the pages you want to delete and then use the Delete tool to remove them.

"Selected Pages" - "Are you sure?" - We click OK and they're deleted.

We can also press the delete key on your keyboard to do the same thing.Extraction is the process of re-using selected pages of one PDF in a different PDF.

Extracted pages contain not only the content but include form fields, comments, and links associated with the original page content.

You can leave the extracted pages in the original document or remove them during the extraction process.To extract pages let's click on the Extract tool and let's specify the range of pages to extract.

To remove the extracted pages from the original document, select Delete Pages After Extracting.To create a single-page PDF for each extracted page, select Extract Pages As Separate Files.  

To leave the original pages in the document and create a single PDF that includes all of the extracted pages, leave both check boxes deselected.

When you are ready, click OK and you'll see the extracted pages are placed in a new document.You can split documents into multiple smaller documents.When splitting a PDF document, you can specify the split by maximum number of pages, maximum file size, or by top-level bookmarks.To split an open document into one or more individual documents we'll use the Split Document tool.

In the Split Document dialog box you can specify the criteria for dividing the document: the number of pages, maximum number of pages for each in the split, the File Size, the maximum file size for each document in the split, and for documents with Bookmarks, the Top-level Bookmarks choice creates one document for every top-level bookmark.To specify a target folder for the split files and filename preferences, click Output Options.

Specify the options as needed.

In this example I have made some bookmarks in the document and I would like to split the documents based on the top level bookmarks.When I use the Split Document tool and choose top level bookmarks you will see that 4 new documents are created.

You can use page thumbnails to copy or move pages within a document, and copy pages between documents.  

I'm going to close out my tools panel for a second and I'm going to show you the page icons.

We can expand our thumbnails ...

and we can move pages within our document by dragging and dropping to a new location.

But we can also use a pair of documents to easily drag pages from one to the next.

So I will tile my 2 documents vertically.

I have pages view open, and I wish to make a copy of pages from one document in to another, so I can select them and drag them into a new location and I have made a copy.

If I wish to make copies of pages, I can select the page I want to copy and option-Drag (Ctrl-drag on Windows) to make a new page in that document.Inserting Pages with Acrobat X is easy when you use the Insert from File tool located in the Tools panel.When you click on the Insert from File tool you are prompted to select the file to insert and whether to insert it before or after the first, or last page of the document.Click OK when you are ready to complete the action and Acrobat X takes care of the rest.

In Acrobat X you have new insert options - these are found in the Pages pane as well.

Let's take a look at these.

Under More Insert Options we have the ability to insert from the Clipboard as a PDF, content from a scanner, the Web, or even insert a blank PDF page.

Acrobat converts the content to PDF and inserts it right in your document.

So you can see the new Pages section of the Tools panel makes manipulating pages in Acrobat X a whole lot easier.