I recently needed to extract about 100 contiguous pages from a 450-page PDF. Simple, right? Wrong.

Don’t try to shift-select in Thumbnail View and then copy to the clipboard, so you can paste into a new, empty PDF document. This will cause Preview, PDF Pen, PDF Viewer and probably most others to freeze up, if not crash. (But that’s a quick way to accomplish the task if you have fewer pages. It’s also a good way to determine where you want to split the PDF in general.)

The phrase “split PDF” is a problematic search on Google and in product manuals. You’ll mostly find tools that export each page as a separate file. (The correct term for that is “burst,” but sadly most documentation doesn’t use it.)

PDF Expert, one of my favorite PDF apps, has an “extract” function that promises to do what I want, but it couldn’t handle the number of pages I was working with.

The venerable and byzantine ghostscript can probably do it with ease, but now I’ve got two problems. I would rather not learn how to install and use ghostscript.

DevonThink has the ability to split PDFs by chapters, but unless your PDF has chapter marks (which are rare, in my experience) it only extracts odd or even pages, which might be useful for someone, but not for me.

I stopped my search, and got on with my work, when I discovered PDFsam. It’s aggressively cross-platform, but provides some very useful functions, including exactly what I needed. Yay! It’s a good tool to have at hand for processing your growing collection of PDFs.