Thanks for the tip.
Not that I’m eager to try this with a 1000 page PDF, but how do you split it up?
You can use Automator.
Change the folder to where you want the PDFs to be saved. Save it as an Application.
With this setting it will give you OriginalName-page1.pdf, OriginalName-page2.pdf …
I have used this with a document that had a lot more pages than yours.
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Can you just drag the document directly from Books? That works when I export documents to the Finder. It should work for dragging to an app, especially if dragging the proxy icon from Preview works.
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Good tip! That does work.
Drag and drop support in macOS is very bad, which is why I didn’t even try. This is worth an entire article. Eg, getting photos from one place (like a browser) to another without saving them to a folder somewhere is often difficult or impossible. I have a “tmp” folder full of hundreds of files and images that I had to put somewhere before I switch to the destination app to “import”. I’m sure I can’t think of all the scenarios, but I think either the source, destination, or both is often a browser.
I remember when drag and drop was maturing in early Mac days (mid 80s). I remember progress where you could start dragging between apps with better support. Not sure what happened, but haven’t improved on it substantially in the last 40 years.
Anyway, thanks for this tip!
Thanks for this power tip. It hurts my head, though, to think about doing something like this just to find text in a document, a use-case that’s about 2 generations old at this point.
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If it’s not working for you, are you sure you’re clicking the magnifying glass? Just clicking in the search field doesn’t evoke the “Exact Phrase” option. And it doesn’t work over here in the search box that appears when I use Command-F. What works over here (14.4.1 Sonoma) is clicking Preview’s Spotlight-ish icon, upper right, and then clicking the magnifying glass at the search field’s left end.
The free version of PDFSam provides a way to split large PDF files. It’s not very Mac-like but does the trick!
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I think I was, but I don’t recall for sure. So I tried clicking on the magnifying glass, and had the same (null) result. Nothing changes, nothing happens. I assume it’s the version of Preview (11.0 (1018.6.3) running under macOS Big Sur 11.7.10) that I’m using.
Try running it through a PDF shrinking site. The size is almost certainly images, which you don’t care much about for this purpose. For instance:
Cool tip. That removed 66% of the size:
So now it let’s me upload it, but it blocks me with another message that seems to think my now-22MB file is still >32MB:
I tried logging in via Google, but that doesn’t help, even though it confirms I should have access to at least 2 PDFs per day:
Not sure that that even means: unlimited chats with 2 different PDFs?
Got this only after emailing the developer. Several things about this was not at all clear from what I was presented with:
On Apr 12, 2024, at 10:19 AM, Mathis Lichtenberger mathis@chatpdf.com wrote:
Hi,
yes, our free version is limited to 2 PDFs/20 questions per day with a maximum size of 120 pages/10MB.
Best
Mathis