Thank you, Shane. What is framework "foundation" and "quartz"? Is the applescript calling a separate utility somewhere using those commands? Or, are they part of the OSX Applescript? I thought about bypassing Acrobat,to make the new documents, but was not sure how reliable it would be, or how it is possible. A typical PDF we get might have 1000 or more pages. Each page has a Barcode with number on the upper right of the page. The barcodes are the same in a sequential series of pages, like chapters in a book. Then the barcode changes. User wants all the "chapters" to be new and separate PDF files. Converting the original PDF to text (using third party utility PDFTOTEXT) and getting a list of the number of pages in each "chapter" with grep was the easy part. Next I want to take those lists to go into the original PDF and break out the sections as separate PDF files all with the same barcodes on their pages. I am not opposed to bypassing Acrobat, just do not understand how it can be done. Thanks, Bob R.