Since the rise of Portable Document Format (PDF), the way users handled electronic documents changed a lot to benefit from it. Smaller size, universal deployment and the most important, powerful security are only a couple of PDF benefits. Because of them, a wide variety of users changed the way they keep documents. Everything is converted to PDF.

Business users convert their emails, spreadsheets or invoices to keep them better organized. Teachers deploy their courses in PDF format, making sure students or other readers do not modify the files. Home users transform important documents to PDF, because PDF is platform independent and a system change will not affect them.

After this first stage, a new problem occurred. At some point, you may want to print or send to a friend only a couple of pages from a PDF, not the whole document. Basically, you would like to extract a few pages into a new PDF document, leaving the original file intact. A solution would be to use a PDF splitter tool. This type of software is very user-friendly. It allows you to select your original (input) PDF and apply a splitting pattern in order to obtain the output file(s). Some professional solutions include the option to define a customized splitting pattern, similar to Word printing pattern. Here is an example: 1,2,3;1-5,3;4-5 . This would result in 3 output documents. The first one will contain pages one, two and three. Second PDF will have pages one to five and page three. The last one will have only pages four to five. Of course, the split PDF process should work with encrypted files, if you know the password.

The need to merge PDF files appeared very soon. You may have two related PDF files and you want to merge them into a single document. Again, you can find a wide variety of tools that can do this. The interface is usually very simple, you have to select the PDF files you want to combine, and the program will do the rest. If you have password-protected documents, and you know the password, you can even merge those files too.

Knowing how to merge and split PDF files is not as important as actually converting the file to PDF format, but it comes in handy after.

One option is Adolix Split and Merge PDF. It's a free tool that will help you combine PDF files and split a given PDF into multiple documents. Another solution is a professional one. Adolix PDF Converter PRO allows you to convert any document to PDF. This program installs itself as a virtual printer, so you can print to PDF any file that allows normal printing. On top of that, you can arrange page order, change document details like title and description, modify images and text compression setting, split PDF files into multiple documents or append one PDF to another. Security options are also available; you can protect your work with 128 bits encryption and password.