In the Variable dropdown, choose New variable… and call it originalPDFs. Now in the Library section on the left, click on Utilities and then find Set Value of Variable.

I haven’t tested it in other applications. Automator Choose Service Set The Variable For The Original PDF(s)Īt the top of the window at the right, change the Service receives selected dropdown to PDF files. In the window that pops up, highlight Service and then hit Choose. In Finder, go to Applications and then start Automator. If you want to skip all this setup, I have attached my Service to the end of this post. There are a number of ways to do this of course, but in this example I will be making a Service. Much like combining PDF files to make one big one, you can split a PDF into separate pages using Automator. If that doesn’t work for you, try this option to split in Preview using the clipboard. It will then copy that page to its own PDF. You can click and drag each page to your desktop or to a Finder window. If you don’t see a list of pages on the right-hand side, click the View Menu button on the left of the toolbar and choose Thumbnails. To split a file into pages using Preview: Preview.app (the application you use to view PDFs and images) has some document management tools under the hood. You can think of this as a companion piece to How To Combine PDFs Using Mac OS X Automator.

You can buy software to do this, but there are options to split a PDF using the built-in tools of Mac OS X. Maybe you scanned a stack of paper intending to make it one PDF per sheet, but instead it went into one big PDF. You have a multi-page PDF that you’d like to split into individual pages.

How to extract pages from pdf on mac