Review of A-PDF Page Cut – software to split a pdf page in half

I came into the requirement of needing to split the  pages of a pdf in half, normally this is required when you scan a book and have two pages per scan, but my specific example was a Lonely Planet digital publication which for some reason was  released similarly, as I wanted to view it on a Kindle I required single pages only.

My first trial was free software Briss, Java coded cross-platform, I did not find it intuitive at all and couldn’t get it to work, there was no way to select exactly half of the sheet, and no batch functionality.

I then moved to Page Cut by A-PDF, A-PDF have an interesting offer called “Blog it and get it” where you blog about the software and they give you a free license, hence this post, hopefully it pulls through.

Page Cut is extremely easy to use, the steps to split a page in half are;

1. Open pdf with Page Cut
2. Click Add a Vertical Line from the toolbar
3. Click Apply with default settings
4. Click Cut and Save As

That’s it you have a single page per page pdf.

Batch Cut Mode is even easier;

1. Import pdf  with Page Cut
2. Select Cut Vertical In Half
3. Click Cut and Save As

So what is Page Cut missing?

I would like to see some smarts; mainly for batch cuts, warnings if cuts go through words (or there isn’t enough blank white space).

The other thing needed is a column showing if the pdf is Landscape or Portait, with the option to select/deselect either. In general a landscape page will have two pages per page, a portrait page can be ignored.

As I needed this functionality, I wrote a little VB function that finds the page orientation, it does require Acrobat though. I could then filter and move to a separate folder landscape orientated pdfs to be imported into Page Cut, here’s the code;

Public Function getOrientation(ByRef gPDFPath As String) As String
    If LenB(gPDFPath) > 0 Then
        Dim acroApp, avDoc, pdDoc, pdPage
        Dim acroPoint
        Dim x As Long, y As Long

        Set acroApp = CreateObject("AcroExch.App")
        If acroApp.GetNumAVDocs = 0 Then 'no existing files
            acroApp.Hide
        End If
        Set avDoc = CreateObject("AcroExch.AVDoc")
        If avDoc.Open(gPDFPath, "Accessing PDF's") Then
            If Not avDoc.IsValid Then
                getOrientation = "Error"
                Exit Function
            End If

            Set pdDoc = avDoc.GetPDDoc()
            Set pdPage = avDoc.GetPDDoc.AcquirePage(0) 'first page

            Set acroPoint = pdPage.GetSize()
            x = acroPoint.x
            y = acroPoint.y
            Set acroPoint = Nothing

            If x >= y Then
                getOrientation = "Landscape"
            Else
                getOrientation = "Portrait"
            End If
        End If
        pdDoc.Close
        avDoc.Close True
'        If acroApp.GetNumAVDocs > 0 Then
'            acroApp.CloseAllDocs
'        End If
        acroApp.Exit
        Set acroApp = Nothing
        Set avDoc = Nothing
        Set pdDoc = Nothing
        Set pdPage = Nothing
    End If
End Function

Finally, on my search for the above functionality I tried A-PDF Explorer, what I noticed was a second folder in my Program Files and Start menu, given A-PDF make a large amount of tools, why not have a root folder A-PDF, with subfolders for each product, makes more sense.