Dragging pages into a useful order solves today’s reading problem. Saving that order solves tomorrow’s reconstruction problem. This exercise uses two synthetic PDFs, so you can publish the result without redistributing a paper you do not own.
Get the source files
Download the supplied five-page paper.pdf and two-page supplement.pdf. Each page carries a visible source label. Open the local page tool and select both. The source list tells you which file received alias A and which received alias B; check that A is paper.pdf and B is supplement.pdf. If your file picker returns them differently, use the displayed aliases in the recipe.
Plan before exporting
A:1-3,B:2,A:5 Output 1 → A page 1 Output 2 → A page 2 Output 3 → A page 3 Output 4 → B page 2 Output 5 → A page 5
Press Preview. You should see five output pages. These are one-based physical PDF positions, not printed page labels. The recipe deliberately omits A4 and B1. Check that those omissions fit your purpose before you make a reading copy.
Save two different artifacts
- Export PDF. Your browser downloads
page-recipe-output.pdf, a separate five-page file. Open it and inspect the visible source labels. - Save recipe JSON. It stores the recipe plus source aliases, filenames and page counts, not the PDF contents.
- Keep the original files. To rebuild later, select the sources again and load the JSON. The tool checks names and page counts; you must still verify that the contents are the intended versions.
For a reverse-and-repeat experiment, enter A:5-3,A:1,A:1. The result is A5, A4, A3, A1, A1. Repetition is allowed and marked in the preview, not silently removed.
This is a page copier, not a full document editor. For subsequent text editing or annotations, KomoPDF is a related product in the same maintenance ecosystem. Page copying may drop document-level features; see the method note before using forms, signed documents or navigational bookmarks.