Selecting and deleting multiple pages in Acrobat DC is unacceptable slow

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
August 20, 2019
3 replies
8493 views

I regularly have pdf-files with about 2500 pages. Sometimes I have to delete every second page of that document except the first one.

I can do that with selecting the right pages in the page miniature pane but that takes forever to select them and then delete them.

Also with thirt part software like Pitstop I can do the same but that will also take around 10-21 minutes to complete.

That is insane long, just to delete pages from a pdf document! I use the latest software on a fast iMac with 10.14.5 osx version

For this problem I keep an old PC with Acrobat 5 on it and there I can select and delete the same amount of pages in less than 1 minute...

But I want to do this on my own Mac computer.

So how do I do this in a normal time-consuming way on my Mac?

This topic has been closed for replies.

3

31045170fhso

Participant

I figured out a hack.... maybe. You just have to change the view to adjust to the blank pages to all be aligned under each other.

click the mountains on the bottom right to adjust the zoom in. Make it only show two pages at a time and then scroll all the way down to ensure all the blank pages are on your right side. You can select all of the blank pages starting from top and keep going down. It will ony delete the blank pages not everything in between.

Karl Heinz Kremer

Community Expert

Chances are it is not your Mac and that it would be about the same speed on a Windows PC. Acrobat got slower over the years (or decades) while Adobe added features and changed the user interface.

If you can mathematically express which pages you need to delete, you can write a script to do that for you. It may not be much fast, but then at least you can just start the process and do something else.

J

jelled6788610Author

Participating Frequently

It's not that I haven't anything else to do but with a script it would take the same time (tried that) - even with a new action-plan of Pitstop. But with the same result:

it takes 9-21 minutes to select and delete every second page of a 2500 page document. That is in 2019 unacceptable for such an expensive "Professional" program.

try67

Community Expert

I used a script to delete every other page of a 2700 page PDF file and it took around three minutes. I don't think that's an excessive amount of time for such a task...