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Duplicate a Page in Adobe Acrobat

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Posted on January 15, 2014 by Karl Heinz Kremer

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Adobe Acrobat DC Pro

Here is a little secret: It is very easy to duplicate a page in Adobe Acrobat and most
Acrobat users dont know about this trick.

Acrobat DC is Here You may

want to wait with upgrading until
you read this
Missing Characters After Merging
or Inserting PDF Files? Here is a

Open up Acrobat and display the Page Thumbnails pane:

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Before we talk about how to duplicate a page, we need to spend some time to understand
what we are seeing in the Page Thumbnails pane. On a very high level, all pages in the
currently open PDF file are reflected as thumbnails. When you look at the active page,
there are a number of different things we can do with the thumbnail view:
If not the entire page is displayed in Acrobat (e.g. we are viewing a page with a zoom level
of 400%), the portion that is being shown is indicated in the thumbnail view. In the above

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Duplicate a Page in Adobe Acrobat - KHKonsulting LLC

screen shot, we can clearly see that the top of the page is brighter than the bottom of the
page. The other thing we see is that the cursor is a little hand This usually means that we
can grab something and move it around. When we click on that bright portion of the page
and move the cursor, we can pan around on the page. This makes it very easy to e.g.
switch to a high zoom level, and by moving this box to the area of the page we are
interested in. No more fiddling with the scroll bars to locate that small detail on a page.
Once we move the cursor away from that highlighted portion of the thumbnail and on to
the lower part, the cursor icon changes to an arrow:

When we now click, something different is happening: The thumbnail gets selected
(indicated by the blue border around the thumbnail in the screenshot). When we click on
a thumbnail that is not the active page, the cursor remains an arrow, and the page gets
selected. This means that if we want to select a page that is not currently shown, it does
not matter where we click, but for the active page, this is important.
If we want to select the current page, we need to make sure that we click on a portion of
the page that is not currently being shown (or, we can simply change which page is active
in Acrobat in order to being able to select a page).
With the arrow cursor active, we can click on a page and we drag that page. This moves the
selected page to a different location in the current PDF file or it copies the page into a
different PDF file if we drag it into a different Page Thumbnails pane. I can for example
move the first page to the end of the document. The place where the page will be inserted
is indicated by a blue bar:

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Duplicate a Page in Adobe Acrobat - KHKonsulting LLC

So here comes the trick: When we hold down the Control key (or the Option/Alt key on a
Mac) before and while we drag the page, that page gets duplicated: We are no longer just
moving the page, we are inserting a copy of the page. Where that page gets inserted is
again indicated by a blue bar:

There you have it, a simple way to duplicate a page in Acrobat.

This entry was posted in Acrobat, PDF, Tutorial and tagged Adobe Acrobat, PDF, tricks, tutorial. Bookmark the
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12 Responses to Duplicate a Page in Adobe Acrobat

Debbie Click says:

February 17, 2014 at 10:49 pm

This is great funny I knew you can do this in PowerPoint but not Adobe. The thing
is I need a clean copy each time, never mind I think I have it, it will take a bit of

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Duplicate a Page in Adobe Acrobat - KHKonsulting LLC

steps, but if I have a blank on we can always make a copy of that one first before
we fill out the one we have. That might just work, thank you! I am going to try
right now!

bill kahny says:

March 11, 2014 at 1:39 pm

Is there a plugin that allows a user to copy a page a variable amount of time and
put it back in the pdf. For example: right click page one in the thumbnail view
choose a new menu item copy page and the user type in say 16, but put 9 for
page 2. you then end up with a pdf with 16 page 1s 9 page 2 and so on?
Could you write a script and if so how much.

Pierre Sidorow says:

April 17, 2014 at 11:45 pm

Can you do this on Reader XI? Or is it only possible on a Pro version?

Karl Heinz Kremer says:

April 18, 2014 at 1:01 pm

This is not possible in Reader. For the most part, Reader is just what the name
implies, an application to read and display PDF files, to modify PDF files you
need Adobe Acrobat.

Carey says:

April 22, 2014 at 4:26 pm

Is it possible to copy the pdf and then create a 2-up file of this page? The reason I
am asking is because I am making an interactive form of my 57 wedding
invitation designs and I would like to create a letter size file with the 57 copied
and placed 2-up on this file. I need to include the bleed and crop marks from the
original 57 design for both copies. Is this possible without having to do
everything manually?

Karl Heinz Kremer says:

April 22, 2014 at 8:46 pm

This is what you would use an imposition application for. There is nothing in
Acrobat that would allow you to do this at least not the way you want to do this.
On Windows, you can try to print to the Adobe PDF printer and selecting to place
multiple PDF pages on one printed page. But again, the right way to do this would
be to use an imposition tool.

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Duplicate a Page in Adobe Acrobat - KHKonsulting LLC

LaaL says:

November 18, 2014 at 12:12 pm

Good

Thanks

-LaaL

Jason McCuen says:

November 28, 2014 at 12:04 pm

Wow! This is super simple and has saved me countless hours of adding new form
fields and data!! Thank you so much!

LeRoy Wright says:

December 19, 2014 at 1:14 am

Copy works great, thanks. Now how I edit copy and change for instance Review to
LeRoy Wright

VSF

Date

Possibly have VSF logo as well

Mohammed Al-Darweesh says:

February 23, 2015 at 3:43 pm

I can duplicate the page but whenever I edit anything in any page it would change
in all copies and will never let me fill each copy differently
how can I solve that

Karl Heinz Kremer says:

February 23, 2015 at 4:02 pm

This is what happens when you duplicate a page with form elements: None of the
form fields will be renamed, so they will all have the same names as on the
original page. All form fields that share the same name will always also share the
same information. This is who AcroForms work, and that feature makes it very
easy to have the same information on multiple pages (e.g. the user name) by just
naming all UserName fields with the same name. If you want to duplicate a page
with form fields, you will have to rename the fields. Alternatively, you can use
page templates to duplicate a page and at the same time rename all form fields on
the spawned page.

Peter Ottenbacher says:

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Duplicate a Page in Adobe Acrobat - KHKonsulting LLC

May 19, 2015 at 2:57 pm

So the true is responsible for giving the fields new names on the new pages?
Awesome.

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