On problem with scanning books, for academic purposes, is one often ends up with two pages side by side, in a single PDF. This makes it hard to OCR, read, annotate, or process.
pdf_splitr is a (very) simple Python tool, which I ‘wrote’ with cursor.ai and Claude. It splits each page into left and right halves, while preserving annotations and handling different page sizes. It uses the Media Box, so as not to change the resulting file size.
It runs from the command line or as a drag-and-drop macOS app using Automator, making it easy to turn scans of two pages into 1 page PDFs.
