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[bookishone]

I'm trying to take notes from a series of scanned book chapters that I've been accumulating for a conference paper I'll be writing shortly. The scans cover both pages of the open book (34&35, 36&37, etc.). Is there any easy and quick way to split the pages so that I get 34, 35, 36, 37 as separate portrait-style images? I'm away from my nice extra monitor and I'm having trouble seeing both the scan and my notes in my reference manager without having to click back and forth every time.

I can figure out a way to split the pages via Acrobat's "crop" function, if I duplicate every page and then crop first the right, then the left-hand side out, but this is too time-consuming given that I have probably 300 pp worth of stuff to read and take notes on.

All of this is made more difficult by the fact that I'm squinting to see the pages through a constant stream of tears from my watery, itchy eyes. I'm in day 6 of a hellacious cold that is proving resistant to copious amounts of Mucinex, antihistamine, and (finally) Sudafed as well as echinacea/zinc/vit C "wellness tea" and I've discovered that it's hard to read OR type through the constant coughing, sneezing, snuffling, and dabbing at the tears literally rolling down my cheeks. But this is the weekend I have to get started on this project, so ... cropping suggestions? (or just sympathy, that would be fine too)

[eigen]

You can do it with Acrobat and splitting. The important thing to remember here is that you can set up a script to crop each odd, even (or every) page to the same dimensions. So crop the first page how you like it, and then apply that same crop template to every "odd" page. Then take the duplicated pages, and crop each one to the other side, then apply that same crop to every "even" page.

Voila.

[bookishone]

You can do it with Acrobat and splitting. The important thing to remember here is that you can set up a script to crop each odd, even (or every) page to the same dimensions. So crop the first page how you like it, and then apply that same crop template to every "odd" page. Then take the duplicated pages, and crop each one to the other side, then apply that same crop to every "even" page.

Voila.

eigen, that sounds like exactly what I want to do! Now off to Google "how to set up script in acrobat." Thanks!

[bookishone]

Sorry for the double post .... but I'm not having success with the Acrobat script thing and I am leery of going too far into my afternoon experimenting with it. Any other suggestions?

[eigen]

Sorry for a probably aberrant use of script-

If you've already got the pages duplicated (which you said you have), it's just in the "crop pages" view. At the bottom right, you can choose to apply the current crop settings to a page range, and then either all, odd, or even pages within that range.

[bookishone]

I see -- no, the problem is that I can't figure out how to tell Acrobat "duplicate every page in order." I'm not exactly proficient in Acrobat, though I'm willing to learn.

[eigen]

Ah! Did a bit of googling, and I think I found the solution... But it will require making a script.

http://forums.adobe.com/message/3945387

Basically, you copy your PDF into two documents. You crop one to make the odd pages, and one to make the even pages. Then you run the above script to take the two files, and collate them. It was originally meant for use with scanning double sided documents (scan all of one side, then all of the other, then collate the two).

[pigou]

Abby Fine Reader can do it very easily, if you have access to the software. I think it does the splitting automatically when it does OCR.

[bookishone]

Thanks for your helpful responses!