There are many, many reasons that you might need or want to split your PDF documents. Perhaps you would like to break up your online catalogue into sections to cut loading times for potential customers, or split a batch of invoices into individual pages to assist with indexing and retrieval. Suffice it to say that the applications of PDF splitting are myriad.

As a result, there are nearly as many tools designed to perform the splitting -- there is even some native splitting and merging functionality in Acrobat itself. As with most 3rd-party PDF tools, the majority of 3rd-party splitting tools have been designed with a specific task or set of tasks in mind. For this reason, I'll introduce desktop splitting tools this time.

In the full version of Acrobat, users can choose to Insert, Extract, Replace or Delete pages or page ranges on an interactive basis, or extend this with the help of Acrobat's Batch Processing engine. Jaws PDF Editor is another PDF viewing and editing application that offers some control of page extraction and deletion, while ARTS PDF Split and Merge Lite adds the ability to split by bookmarks or page ranges to users of Acrobat.

Next week, I'll address more advanced desktop PDF splitting, so watch this space! Until then, please browse PDF Store's Split & Merge PDF aisle for the complete range of tools for PDF Splitting.