Splitting PDF trouble

I’m trying to split a pdf. Everytime I click on ‘split document’, I get the spinning ball for a few seconds, then the application crashes. When I open it again, the document is split, but I only have one document not two. Everything before the split point is left in the original (modification date does not change) and everything after the split point completely disappears.

Please locate the crash log (see folder ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter) and send it to our support address. Thanks.

Sent. There were four logs in there from last night. I think the pdf thing happened twice, so I’m not sure which logs went with this issue. I sent all four.

I’ve also similar crashes and I sent a couple of crash reports to your support address.

However, I’ve another strange thing regarding splitting PDFs. Sometimes when I split a PDF one of the split PDFs disappears completely. E.g. I have a document with 20 pages, I select the second page, right click and then split. The result is a new document with the first page, but the last 19 pages disappear completely. There are no messages in the Console. The biggest problem for me is that I can’t undo the last split operation, so I effectively have to rescan / reimport the corresponding document.

Seems the problem is not solved yet. I use DT 2.0.3 Pro here and it crashes every time I split a single PDF file – very very annoying for all that money. Almost tired up with the **** – time to look for another document management system.

That’s a bug that will be corrected in the next maintenance release (and is discussed in related posts on the forum).

Until the next release, please use an alternative method of splitting PDFs (which is, in fact, the one I usually use anyway).

  1. Set View > PDF Display> to Show Sidebar. The right sidebar will display page icons for the PDF.

  2. Select a page or range of pages to be extracted from the PDF and press Command-X to Cut them from the PDF.

  3. Choose Data > New > With Clipboard (or press “Command-N”) to create a new PDF that consists of the pages selected and Cut from the original PDF. Name it as appropriate.

  4. Repeat the procedure on the original PDF until all desired segments have been split out as separate PDFs.

Thanks for the pasteboard tip.

Thanks for that hint, sounds a bit like Steve Jobs on the iPhone 4 antenna issue: »Just don’t hold it that way.« I use DT for a couple of weeks in a productive environment: thousands of PDFs and other documents and certain small, annoying and workflow slowing bugs. Is there a scheduled time period we can expect the cure?

In general, Dtech has been more conservative with announcing release dates/schedules. There was some recent discussion about that: here.

Come on, don’t be so rude. DT admits that there is a bug and gives you hints about how you can avoid it and they say that they’ll fix it in one of the future versions.

Which I definitely appreciate, in contrast to struggles I go through with other developers to do that even after being presented with convincing evidence.

As a matter of fact, I think Steve Jobs responded truthfully and accurately to a completely over-hyped bit of FUD.

I haven’t gotten an iPhone 4 yet, but I’ve tested two samples, each of which can lock onto the ATT signal and make calls (without dropping them) in an area in which my iPhone 3G cannot make a call. And that was true even when holding the iPhone 4 “that way”. :slight_smile:

Ok, it was my fault to bring in the iPhone here – the iPhone is great, nothing compares to it, nothing is better and even holding it »that way« does not make it losing it’s majesty. I wrote that just as a metapher and not to establish a discussion about the device. But Jobs’ statement about a user’s concern is a shame. Of course I extensively tried the recommended method of splitting PDFs and found it very useful. Copy and paste functionality for individual pages is really helpful at all. As long as DT can handle it properly. Just tried to copy a page from one PDF to another and DT crashed - not so good. After doing it a couple of times without problems I don’t know what went wrong.

Please send a message to Support with a copy of a DEVONthink crash report tht resulted from copy/paste of PDF pages. Crash reports can be found at ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/.

Any Console log messages at the time of the crash would also ne helpful.

Anything new on this?

I still accidentally use the split functionality, DTP then freezes and I have to force quit and start the application again. It would be great if you could fix (or at least remove) the functionality after the bug was reported about one year ago.

Thanks.

This isn’t a year-old bug, although a similar problem has appeared in version 2.0.3.

The version 2.0.3 issue with splitting PDFs will be corrected in version 2.0.4.

Sorry for the confusion and thanks for the update.

You folks rule :slight_smile: