Following are some hints on performing some actions in “full” Acrobat (not the Reader version). These apply to Acrobat 6.0 for Mac OS X and may not be accurate for other versions.
Rotating pages
- Click Pages in the far-left Navigation Tabs to show the page thumbnails
- Click on the thumbnail of the page you'd like to rotate, to select the page
- You can select more than one page using Apple-click on each page
- You can select a range of pages by clicking on the first thumbnail of the range, then Shift-click on the last page of the range
- Right-click (or Ctrl-click) on the page (or one page of multiple selected pages)
- Select Rotate pages...
- Pick the appropriate direction of rotation
- Click OK
Cropping pages
Sometimes just a single page needs cropping. More often, all the pages of a document (or all the odd pages, then all the even pages) need the same crop treatment -- that can be achieved in one crop by making the appropriate selections (described below)
- Select View / Toolbars / Advanced Editing to make sure the cropping tool is available (it looks like this:
) - Bring up a page you'd like to crop
- Click on the crop tool, then click-and-drag across the page to outline the area you'd like to keep
- Click the crop tool again
- Select what pages to crop
- To crop just the selected page, make sure that page is specified in the From: block near the bottom, and that Crop: Even and Odd Pages is selected, then click OK
- To crop multiple pages, select All, or Selected (if you preselected some pages in the Pages thumbnail navigation panel), or an appropriate From: range. Then select the appropriate setting of Crop: to pick even, odd, or all pages, then click OK.
Replacing pages
Sometimes you have two versions of a document and want to replace a chunk of pages in one document with pages from another document. That's relatively easy since there is a way to copy-and-paste pages from one PDF to another so that they replace existing pages (rather than just being inserted).
- Open both PDFs simultaneously in Acrobat
- View them both, using Window / Tile / Vertically
- On both documents, click Pages in the far-left Navigation Tabs to show the page thumbnails
- Find the pages you want to replace in the target document and the new pages in the source document
- Select the source (new) page thubmnails by clicking on the first thumbnail of the page range then Shift-clicking on the last page
- Click-and-drag the source (new) thumbnails to the page number at the bottom of the thumbnail of the first page in the range to be replaced in the target document. You'll see the target pages highlight themselves, and then be replaced with the new pages when you release the mouse button.
It is critical to drag to the little page number at the base of the first page you want to replace in the target document. That induces Acrobat to replace the page range. Just dragging to the page thumbnail image (or the background) will insert the dragged pages, leaving all the original pages in the target document intact.
Extracting pages (splitting a PDF)
It is possible to split a PDF in Acrobat by “extracting” a range of pages. You can do this multiple times to split a PDF into more than two sub-documents. (Note that this can be done non-interatively at the commandline using the pdftk tool — not discussed further here.)
- Click Pages in the far-left Navigation Tabs to show the page thumbnails
- Select the range of pages for the first sub-document by clicking on the first thumbnail of the desired page range then Shift-clicking on the last thumbnail of the range.
- Right-click (or Ctrl-click) on one of the selected page thumbnails
- Select Extract Pages...
- Check that the From.. range looks right
- Select the Delete Pages After Extracting if you want to "whittle away" at the original document to make the split parts
- Click OK
- Select File / Save As... to name and save the extracted chunk
Repeat the selection/extraction routine for each sub-document you want to create. If you chose to Delete Pages After Extracting, then your selection begins at the first page of the document for each sub-document. You'll re-save the original document (using File / Save As...) to save the very last sub-document.