Copying and pasting pages between PDFs in PDF by Zaweba

Moving pages between documents should be as easy as moving text between them, and in PDF by Zaweba it is. The keys you already know for copying and pasting words work on whole pages in the thumbnails. Ctrl+C copies, Ctrl+X cuts and Ctrl+V pastes, within a document or into any other open tab.

Within one document

Click a thumbnail, or select several, and press Ctrl+C to copy or Ctrl+X to cut. Then click where you want them and press Ctrl+V. Cut and paste is a quick way to move a group of pages; copy and paste makes a second set of them somewhere else in the document.

For a single page going a short distance, the move commands in the Pages menu may be quicker. Cut and paste comes into its own for groups of pages and for jumps across a long document, where scrolling the thumbnails to the new place and pasting is simpler than working out page numbers.

Between documents

The real convenience is between tabs. Open two PDFs, copy pages in the thumbnails of one, switch to the other tab and paste. The pages go in where you paste them.

That covers a lot of everyday jobs. Taking the signed page out of a scan and putting it in the original. Pulling three pages out of a long report to make a short summary. Gathering the relevant pages of several documents into one pack for a meeting. Each is a matter of opening the files in tabs and copying across.

Cutting from one tab and pasting into another moves pages from one document to the other. Be careful with this. The source document loses those pages, so check that is what you want before saving it.

Tips for clean results

Select carefully. Click a thumbnail to choose it, and use the usual Windows way of adding more to a selection when you want several. For larger selections, Pages > Select pages can pick odd, even, landscape or portrait pages, or a list you type.

Watch the tabs. With several PDFs open it is easy to paste into the wrong one. Check the tab's name before pasting, and check the thumbnails after.

Remember undo. Each paste is undoable, so if pages land in the wrong place, Ctrl+Z takes them out again.

Save the documents you changed. When you paste between tabs, the document you pasted into has changed, and if you cut, the one you cut from has changed too. Both need saving if you want to keep the result.

Other ways to do similar jobs

Copy and paste suits picking pages by hand. For larger jobs, other page tools may fit better. Insert pages from another PDF brings in pages without opening the second file in a tab. Extract pages sends chosen pages to a new tab or to separate files. Split cuts a document into parts by page count, bookmarks or size.

Pages can also be inserted from the clipboard when what you have copied is a picture, text or files rather than PDF pages, which is handy for adding a screenshot or a photo as a page.

Why it matters

Most people already know Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. Making them work on pages in PDF by Zaweba means there is almost nothing to learn: if you can copy a sentence from one letter to another, you can copy a page from one PDF to another.