Splitting single page into two pages with ghostscript

Question

I have a pdf with something like presentations slides and multiple slides per page. How can I use ghostscript to split the file so that there is one slide per page?

Answer 1

The answer of KenS is the one which should be accepted by @howardh. KenS uses a very clever PostScript language program to achieve the result. (Always keep in mind what KenS said: his solution will work well only 'if all the 'subpages' (ie slides) are the same size and location on the PDF page and that all the PDF pages are the same size).

However, for completeness' sake, let me link to a few other previous answers (some of which are illustrated), which solved similar problems:

• Convert PDF 2 sides per page to 1 side per page (SuperUser.com)
• How can I split a PDF's pages down the middle? (SuperUser.com)
• Cropping a PDF using Ghostscript 9.01 (StackOverflow.com)
• PDF - Remove White Margins (StackOverflow.com)
• Split one PDF page into two (StackOverflow.com)
• Freeware to split a pdf's pages down the middle? (SuperUser.com)

These answers also use PostScript code, but only as 'snippets' which are passed to Ghostscript on the commandline. (If you are not PostScript-savvy, these may be more easy to modify and adapt for cases where the 'subpages' are not of the same size and location on PDF pages, and where PDF pages are of different sizes.)