How Splitting a PDF Makes Your Customers’ Lives Easier

Summary: Discover the benefits of PDF splitting for efficient document management. Extract specific pages easily, enhancing sharing and organization in business and academia.

PDFs are a great shareable format and are used across a wide range of industries. Whether they originated as physically printed documents that were later scanned or were born digital (i.e., they contain real text), they are a great solution to storing and sharing information.

However, their ability to hold large amounts of information can create problems. PDFs can be very large. For example, the Flight plan for Apollo 17 is a scanned document 618 pages long, and the PDF Reference for 1.7 contains more than 1300 pages.

This can make the documents unwieldy. In this article, we look at some common scenarios where splitting a PDF into smaller or customized documents would be beneficial.

We will also see how Apryse offers solutions for splitting large PDFs into smaller, more manageable ones.

You want to extract just a small range from the PDF to create a new document containing only the page range of interest.

Use case: Modifying a document that has already been reviewed. Imagine you have a hundred-page document that management has reviewed and signed off on. Unfortunately, one section needed to be changed and then sent back to the reviewer for approval. Rather than sending the entire document to the reviewer, the relevant section (for example, pages 10-15) can be extracted and sent. This reduces the need for the reviewer to search through the entire document for the relevant pages – saving them time, and it also prevents them from wanting to make changes to those parts of the document that have already been agreed to.

Following on from the previous example, small files are easier to understand in their entirety than single large files. This can make it much simpler to extract information from them.

Use case: Finding differences between two files. Apryse WebViewer includes the ability to compare two different files, highlighting their differences. With smaller files, there are only a few pages where the differences need to be compared. With large files, the sheer complexity of changes can be overwhelming to the point that it becomes difficult to understand what the changes mean.

Long PDFs typically use more memory than shorter PDFs. This means that transferring them over the internet requires more data and is slower, and the resulting file can be slower to load and use within the viewer.

Use case: Data transfer limits on file size. Some email systems limit the size of files that can be attached. Google, for example, has a limit of 25MB. While large files can be shared via Google Drive (or some similar mechanism), there may be reasons or company policies that make that unacceptable as a solution.

Splitting a large PDF into multiple small files allows all the data to be sent in one email.

Use case: Poor internet. If you are using a mobile device in a location where the network is either slow, expensive, or only sporadically available, receiving smaller files is likely more effective than getting a single large file. Even if only some files can be fully downloaded because of patchy internet, this is still better than having a single large file that never completely downloads. Typically, in that scenario, after a long, frustrating wait, you would cancel the download and be left with nothing useful.

Smaller files are not only faster to transfer – they also use less memory when they are viewed or worked with, making them more responsive.

Use case: Customers with low-end devices and limited memory. Very large files result in a poor user experience, with the PDF scrolling slowly since the available RAM is all in use. Smaller files, however, place less stress on the memory, allowing for a more responsive and perceptibly better viewing experience.

Automated workflows, whether it is for invoicing or data extraction, may need to split PDFs that contain a mixture of relevant and irrelevant data.

Use Case: Extracting financial information from SEC reports. Company reports (for example, Google's 10-K) contain many pages of introduction and context as well as information about the company's financial status. If your interest is only in financial data, splitting the PDF to create a new document that contains only the pages of interest will lead to more accurate, faster, and cheaper data extraction.

Find out more about Apryse’s IDP and PDF extraction 

If a PDF contains multiple types of information, different users may have different interests in how the data is stored. Someone interested in Health and Safety may want the document stored in the health and safety collection. Similarly, the Legal department might consider the document to be “theirs” if there is a legal section. Splitting the document up allows each group to store those parts, and potentially only those parts, of the document that are relevant to them.

Use Case: Research or reports containing multiple types of data. An annual report may include data related to various geographic locations, with a section for each location. However, other documentation that is being managed might be based only on geographic location.

Splitting the PDF so that the data relating to each location is in a separate document allows it to be stored with the other files relating to the same location, providing a logical way to store, search for, and retrieve the information.

Some documents, by their very nature, contain confidential data—whether for commercial reasons or in compliance with privacy laws (such as HIPAA) and other policies. When it comes to sharing those documents, the ability to create a version of the document that does not contain confidential information completely removes the risk of it being inadvertently leaked.

Use case: Allowing content that should be publicly available to be safely shared even though it is within a document that also contains confidential information. Imagine a contract that contains some aspects that are public and others that are commercially sensitive information. As a simple example, let’s assume it relates to a grand tree-planting scheme in a municipal park. There is now a need to share the general information about the scheme with a third person, a local newspaper so that they can say what a great job the city is doing. While the commercially sensitive information could be redacted, it may make more sense, if acceptable, to create a version of the document that does not contain the section at all.

Splitting a lengthy PDF can make it easier for users with special needs to access the content within it. Smaller files also reduce the time it takes to download, which can help reduce cognitive load.

Use case: User with poor motor skills. Being able to see all of a small document without scrolling, even if there are many separate documents in total, may be easier to work with and understand, rather than requiring the user to scroll through a long document, which may be physically difficult or impossible for them,

One of the great things about PDFs is that they can be created using a combination of DOCX files, Images, and other PDFs, etc. that have been merged together. However, you may then need to work on just one of the original parts of the document. Splitting allows that single document to be extracted.

Use case: Editing part of a PDF that originated as a DOCX file. Separating out the pages that originally came from a DOCX file from the rest of the PDF allows for better conversion of the file to Word and an easier document editing experience with sophisticated formatting.

So far, we have only looked at how to split a PDF into smaller files. But at the end of the day, you may need to put those files back together again. Thankfully, there are many tools that allow you to combine PDFs into a single file. Some are cloud-based, such as xodo.com, or desktop-based, such as Xodo PDF studio.

Ultimately, therefore, you can take a PDF, split it up, modify one or more parts of it, and then put it all back together again, and you can often do that with a fraction of the effort involved in regenerating the document from scratch.

I briefly mentioned xodo.com and Xodo PDF Studio which both provide a great mechanism for interactively working with PDFs. However, if you want to work with the documents programmatically, then the Apryse SDK, a world-leading Document Processing library, is the way to go. Among the wide range of functionality that it offers, it provides a simple way to create one or multiple PDFs by splitting up a single large document and, if necessary, stitching the parts back together.

Apryse technology can do more than just splitting and merging the files, though. You may still be interested in redacting parts of them to improve data security or optimizing and compressing the generated documents to allow faster transfer when bandwidth is an issue.

In fact, the Apryse SDK offers a huge range of functionality, meaning that you can likely solve many document processing issues using just a single library.

Check out the samples to see what Apryse can do for you, and if you have any questions, then drop us a message on Discord.