I need to reformat a 2-up A3 document to 2 A4 pages

[tony_bacon]

I'm trying to archive a whole lot of old newsletters, stored as PDFs. They are each 4 A4 pages, formatted as 2 A3 pages (1 & 4 and 2 & 3). They were issued as printed documents, but now we want to archive them to the web. I would like to change the files to be 4 individual pages so they can be easily read in the correct order. Does anyone know how I can do that and still preserve the qualities of the original PDF? I've managed various laborious cut and paste solutions but apart from being time-consuming they all end up with pages being images that get fuzzy as they are enlarged. There are also about 10 years x 12 months worth of these, so a speedy conversion process is also going to be helpful.

All suggestions gratefully received.

[Bernd Alheit]

Did you try the crop tool?

[tony_bacon]

Thanks for the suggestion. I haven't used crop before as I haven't had a need, but having had a look I can see how it might work.

I guess the workflow would be:

1. Open the original document
2. do 4 "crop and saveas" operations to end up with each page as an individual file.
3. Combine those files into one PDF.

Have I got that right?

The issue I would have to resolve is that the original content would still be part of the combined file, making it considerably larger than it would otherwise be. Is there a means of permanently removing the hidden content? I suppose I could print each individual cropped page to PDF (I'm using Acrobat 9.5), but that is another operation, and with 200+ files to manipulate I would really like to streamline it as much as possible.

I do have some programming skills: would I be able to automate it somewhat with Javascript? Or are there (washing my mouth out with soap ) non-Adobe tools available that I could use?

[Karl Heinz Kremer]

Take a look here for a JavaScript Action that I created a while ago: Page Splitter Redux - KHKonsulting LLC

[tony_bacon]

That looks like exactly what I need -thanks very much. I downloaded spliiter.js and also the installer and it all seems to work as advertised. That is going to save me a lot of work. Still 200+ files, but at least the processing will be simplified.

One very basic question - if I hadn't used the installer, how would I actually get the script to execute?

[Karl Heinz Kremer]

You would need to copy the script to either the user level, or the application level JavaScripts directory.

[tony_bacon]

Thanks.