How to delete pages from pdf file using Python?

Question

I have some .pdf files with more than 500 pages, but I need only a few pages in each file. It is necessary to preserve document`s title pages. I know exactly the numbers of the pages that program should remove. How I can do it using Python 2.7 Environment, which is installed upon MS Visual Studio?

Asked By: Alexander

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Source

Answer 1

Use pyPDF2:

https://github.com/mstamy2/PyPDF2

Documentation is at:

https://pythonhosted.org/PyPDF2/

It seems pretty intuitive.

Answered By: Daniel Paczuski Bak

Answer 2

Try using PyPDF2.

Instead of deleting pages, create a new document and add all pages which you don’t want to delete.

Some sample code (originally adapted from BinPress which is dead, archived here).

from PyPDF2 import PdfWriter, PdfReader
pages_to_keep = [1, 2, 10] # page numbering starts from 0
infile = PdfReader('source.pdf', 'rb')
output = PdfWriter()

for i in pages_to_keep:
    p = infile.pages[i] 
    output.add_page(p)

with open('newfile.pdf', 'wb') as f:
    output.write(f)

or

from PyPDF2 import PdfWriter, PdfReader
pages_to_delete = [3, 4, 5] # page numbering starts from 0
infile = PdfReader('source.pdf', 'rb')
output = PdfWriter()

for i in range(len(infile.pages) ):
    if i not in pages_to_delete:
        p = infile.get_page(i)
        output.add_page(p)

with open('newfile.pdf', 'wb') as f:
    output.write(f)

Answered By: Maximilian Peters

Answer 3

Today in 2023, the other method to accomplish this is to use the PyMuPDF library. On Windows 11, you can install this from command prompt like so

pip install PyMuPDF

Once installed, you can use it as such:

# Import library
import fitz

# Open the PDF file
doc=fitz.open("in_file.pdf")
    
# Say, you like to save the first 6 pages, first page is 0
doc.select([0,1,2,3,4,5])
   
# Save the selected pages to a new PDF
doc.save("out_file_name.pdf")

Answered By: Harry

How to delete pages from pdf file using Python?

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