Split very large PDF

[Terkelsen]

One of my customers is receiving on a regular basis a PDF containing 100.000 pages for printing. Yes, I know it is insane but that's how their customer insist to deliver.

I'm not surprised that their RIP is giving up on this job trying to feed the printer with 800 pages pr. minute. They have found that splitting the PDF into smaller portions will help and we try to automate this, but it takes forever. Split PDF feature in Switch gave up even though the time out was set to 1000 minutes.

Next thing is that we would want to rasterise the PDF. This action takes 17 minutes for a sample file of 100 pages, which means that it will take 14 days to manage 100.000 pages.

Does any of you have experience with a method that can handle this amount of pages in an acceptable time frame?

We all know that the correct way to handle this would be to ask the customer to deliver a two page PDF and a file containing all the variable data, but my customer got this order exactly because they accepted to receive the file like this.

[jan_suhr]

Have you tried PDF Toolkit?

https://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-man-page/

Look at the cat command

[Terkelsen]

Hi Jan,

No, but I've tried ImageMagick and after two hours it's still working to just split a 100 page PDF.

Any idea what the argument should look like in Execute Command if I use PDFtk?

[Zoranj]

I am afraid Pdftoolkit will give you similar performance like split pdf configurator.
At least that was my experience when I was in same situation.
I tried emailing author of Pdftollkit to ask if there is an option to recompile it to use more memory, never got response from him.

[jan_suhr]

Hi Jan,

No, but I've tried ImageMagick and after two hours it's still working to just split a 100 page PDF.

Any idea what the argument should look like in Execute Command if I use PDFtk?

You will use the something like this:

pdftk A=incoming.pdf cat A1-A5000 output outgoing.pdf

This command will make a new PDF from page 1 to page 5000.

With my app Execute command friend you could set up this with variables and a flow that loops and calculate new values for A1 and A5000.

With scripting you could do it even simpler if you have the Scripting module.
I think that the hard part here is the writing of the new file.

Is this some kind of variable job and they give you the total file for it?
As you know there are a lot of smart solutions out there to do it.

[Terkelsen]

Hi Jan,

Yes, the stupid thing is that this is actually just a two page PDF with a variable number, a name and an address on page 1, but the customer insist on delivering this as a 100.000 pages PDF

Excuse my ignorance but what would the argument you suggest look like as an argument in Switch Execute Command?

[jan_suhr]

PDFToolkit is a little problematic to run directly in Execute command. If you are on Windows you need to create a .bat-file.

If you download the app I mentioned I think that there is a pdftk example for something like this.

For the customer, tell them that what send now will cost them €10000 extra, if they let you do the data handling it will not cost anything more.

[jan_suhr]

Send me an email and I can tell you about a solution that might be acceptable for both of you.