Split Smart Guide

Learn to develop your own Split Smart software to split PDF files automatically using a custom prompt.

Remember that in order to use our Tool Guides, you need to have previous knowledge about the basics to processing a PDF with our REST API. We strongly recommend that you read the Processing a PDF guide before starting this one.

Advanced Split Smart

The following example will show you how to split a PDF document using the Split Smart tool and a custom prompt.

You can define how the PDF should be split by setting the prompt text with the setPrompt method:

Smart Split


require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

use Ilovepdf\Ilovepdf;

$ilovepdf = new Ilovepdf('PUBLIC_KEY', 'SECRET_KEY');

$task = $ilovepdf->newTask('splitsmart');

$task->addFile('path/to/file.pdf');

$task->setPrompt('Split this PDF by invoice number.');

$task->execute();

$task->download(__DIR__);

The prompt tells the API how to identify and separate the content inside the PDF.

Here are some prompt examples you can use:

Split this PDF by invoice number.
Split this document whenever a new contract starts.
Create a separate file for each customer record.
Split the PDF by chapter title.
Separate each report section into its own PDF file.

The REST API processes your document according to the prompt and returns the resulting split PDF files.