Answer by Ho1 for How can I extract a page range / a part of a PDF?

QPDF is great. Use it this way to extract pages 1 to 10 from input.pdf and save it as output.pdf:

qpdf input.pdf --pages . 1-10 -- output.pdf

This preserves all metadata associated with that file.

From the old manual:

If you wanted pages 1 through 5 from infile.pdf but you wanted the rest of the metadata to be dropped, you could instead run

qpdf --empty --pages infile.pdf 1-5 -- outfile.pdf

Here's a link to the current documentation, giving more examples of page selection.

You can install it by invoking:

sudo apt-get install qpdf

It is a great tool for PDF manipulation. It's very fast and has very few dependencies. From QPDF's GitHub repo:

QPDF is a command-line tool and C++ library that performs content-preserving transformations on PDF files. It supports linearization, encryption, and numerous other features. It can also be used for splitting and merging files, creating PDF files (but you have to supply all the content yourself), and inspecting files for study or analysis.