Time to invoke the empeg braintrust again on behalf of my GF...

She's an officemouse by trade. She prints the company's payroll check stubs (just the stubs... the money itself gets direct-deposited) and individually snailmails them to the employees.

She'd like to go paperless with this, emailing PDFs of the check stubs rather than snailmailing them. Her accounting software won't save PDF files, but she's been using the freeware "PDF995" printer driver to sometimes generate PDFs from printouts. Works well. Except...

... when she prints the entire company's payroll stubs, PDF995 makes one bighugegiant PDF file with each paystub as a page, rather than a bunch of little PDF files that she can individually email to her employees.

She could, in theory, do "Select employee one. Print paystub. Select employee two. Print paystub. etc..." but you can see how that would get really old really fast.

What she's looking for is something like PDF995, but she needs something that will let her optionally define each printed page within a single printjob as a separate PDF file. Or, alternatively, a tool that will slice up a PDF file into separate files for each page after the fact.

Any ideas?

At home I use PFDCreator and at work I use PDFCreator and pdfFactory Pro.

Thanks for those links!

Does PDFCreator have the feature built-in that we're asking for? (In other words, could she use it in place of PDF995 and it'll pop up a clear option to split into pages?) It's hard to tell from the web site.

The other splitting tools look good, too, thanks.

As far as I can see PDFCreator won't help with the splitting, it has combining features where you can merge more that one print job into a single PDF, but I don't see any splitting features.

Presumably she is printing this from some accounts package, rather than something like Word ?

This certainly sounds like a job for ghostscript to me. Ghostscript is very powerful, but it takes some time to master. You'll obviously have to set up the batch file for the person. Being what my cow-orkers call "a linux person" this sounds much better than using some gui interface program which almost does what you want. Many people would say this sounds much worse. To each their own.

Quote:
One page per file

You can also tell Ghostscript to put each page of output in a separate file. To send output to a series of files each representing a single page, use in the filename the printf format specifier "%d" (or its extended form like "%02d"); for instance

I'd see it as: Person saves PDF to "incoming PDF directoy". You launch the bash script which divides it into pages, you use pdf2txt to extract the strings, you grep out the name and rename the PDF to that persons name. Version two would look up the name in a table, and send the email automatically. Version 3 require migrating to perl, and would take over most of the accounting package function to try and eliminate the "print to PDF" setp, and probably isn't a good idea. In version 4, we migrate to PHP, and turn the payroll system into a web based application with manager, secretary, and employee roles.

Matthew