Working with documents

Organise pages

How to reorder, rotate, delete, insert, extract and split PDF pages with the vivePDF page organizer, and what happens to the original file.

The page organizer is where you reorder, rotate, delete, insert and split pages in vivePDF. Open a document, then click Pages in the top bar to see every page as a thumbnail. Nothing touches the file until you press Apply and save, and by default the result is written to a new file.

The basic flow

  1. Open the document in the Viewer, then choose Pages in the top bar. The organizer always works on the document open in the Viewer.
  2. Select pages and drag them to their new place.
  3. Rotate, delete, insert or mark where to split. Every step can be undone with Ctrl+Z and redone with Ctrl+Y.
  4. Click Apply and save or press Ctrl+Enter. The new file goes where the save field at the bottom shows.

Select pages

Click a page to select it and double-click to preview it. For several pages, Shift- or Ctrl-click, tick the box in a card’s corner, or drag across an empty area. Ctrl+A selects them all and Esc clears the selection.

The Select menu in the toolbar goes further:

  • Select by page numbers (Ctrl+G): type ranges such as 1-5, 9, 12-.
  • Select odd pages, Select even pages, Invert selection
  • Select blank pages, Select scanned pages, Find duplicate pages
  • Select by text…: selects the pages that contain a given piece of text.
  • Selection By page size, or portrait and landscape pages

Reorder, rotate and delete

Drag pages to reorder them. To move the selected pages to a particular position, press M and type the page number.

The Edit pages menu holds:

  • Rotate left and Rotate right (Shift+R / R)
  • Duplicate (Ctrl+D) and Make copies…
  • Delete selected (Delete), plus deleting every page before or after one
  • Reverse order and Reverse selected pages
  • Fix page orientation: finds pages lying sideways or upside down and turns them.
  • Prepare for two-sided printing: arranges fronts and backs for printers without automatic duplex.
  • Page labels: gives pages a cover label or numbers such as i, ii, iii.

When you point at a card, buttons to rotate or delete that page alone appear on it too.

Insert pages

From the Insert menu choose Insert blank page (B), Insert pages from PDF or Insert pages from images. For blank pages you can pick the paper size, the orientation and a paper pattern such as lined, graph or dot grid. You also decide whether new pages go before the selection, after it or at the end. Replace selected pages with pages from a PDF swaps the selection for pages from another file.

Moving pages between documents

Copy the selected pages with Ctrl+C, switch to another document’s tab and paste them with Ctrl+V. Dragging pages onto another document’s tab copies them to the end of that document.

Split and extract

  • To split, select pages and press S, or use Split › Split after selected pages. Split at chapters (bookmarks) cuts the document at every chapter start, and Remove split marks (Shift+S) clears them all. When the marks are in place, click Save as separate files.
  • To make a new PDF from the selected pages only, choose Extract selected or press Ctrl+E.
  • In the Export menu, Save as pictures… saves pages as image files and Print… prints the selected pages, or all of them.

What happens to the original?

By default Apply and save writes the result to a new file and the original stays as it was. To write the change straight into the original, turn on Overwrite the original file; the button then reads Apply to original. If the document has unsaved changes in the Viewer, vivePDF asks you to save or discard them first. You can choose where new files are saved by default in Settings › Files.

Separate page tools

Use Tools › Merge to combine several PDFs into one file, and Tools › Split to break a PDF up by page ranges, a fixed page count, file size or bookmarks. There are also separate tools for rotating, deleting and extracting pages; they are all listed on the Tools page.

In the organizer, the ? key shows every shortcut; for the full list see Keyboard shortcuts. If you want scanned pages to be searchable once they are in order, the OCR page explains how.