Split scanned book PDF: separate even and odd pages

2 min read·25 July 2026

When you scan a book on a flatbed scanner, each scan contains two pages. Learn how to convert a scanned book PDF into individual single pages.

The problem: double-page scans

When scanning a book on a flatbed scanner, each scan contains two pages side by side (left and right page). This creates a PDF where each "page" is actually a spread. On an e-reader or tablet this is hard to read and text search works poorly on spread scans.

Separating even and odd pages

The Even/Odd tool on PDFrust divides a PDF into two separate files: one with all odd pages (left pages of the book) and one with all even pages (right pages). After splitting, merge the two files in the correct reading order with the Merge tool.

Odd / even pages

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Step by step for scanned books

Step 1: Scan the book front to back. Each scan contains two pages. Step 2: Upload the scan PDF to PDFrust. Step 3: Use the Even/Odd tool to divide spread pages into two files. Step 4 (manual): Crop each page to the left or right side (this requires an external tool like PDF-XChange). Step 5: Merge the individual pages in reading order.

Cropping after splitting

After splitting each "page" still has the original scan size. Use the Crop tool to trim away the unnecessary half of each page. Set the crop rectangle to the left or right half of the scan. This requires manual positioning per page for best results.

Add OCR for searchable text

Scans are images, not text. Add OCR (optical character recognition) with the OCR tool on PDFrust to make scanned text searchable. After OCR you can select and copy text, and the PDF is suitable for e-readers with word search functionality.