Split PDF Pages

How it works

1. Drop in the PDF you want to work on.
2. Type the pages: single numbers, ranges, or both, "1-3, 7, 9-12".
3. Choose whether to keep those pages or throw them away.
4. Download the result. The original file on your disk is untouched.

About this tool

Extract a page range, split a document into single pages, or delete pages you do not want, then download the result. Runs in your browser with nothing uploaded.

How do I write the page numbers?

However you would say them out loud. 4 is a single page, 2-6 is a range, and 1-3, 7, 9-12 mixes both. Spaces do not matter. 8- means "from page 8 to the end" and -3 means "from the start to page 3". Pages always count from 1, the way they are numbered on screen rather than the way a programmer would count them.

Keep or remove?

Keep gives you a document made only of the pages you listed, in document order. Remove gives you everything except those pages. They are two ways of describing the same operation, and which one is less typing depends on whether you want most of the document or very little of it.

Does splitting lose quality?

No. Pages are copied across as they are, with their fonts, images and vectors intact, nothing is re-rendered or re-compressed. The result will usually be smaller than the original simply because it contains fewer pages, though shared resources mean it is rarely an exact fraction. As with merging, a digital signature will not survive, because the file it certified no longer exists.

How to write the page range

Ranges are written the way you would say them out loud. 1-3 takes the first three pages. 5 takes one page. 1-3, 7, 9- takes the first three, then page seven, then everything from nine to the end. Spaces make no difference and the order you write them in does not matter, because pages always come out in document order. A number larger than the document is refused with a message rather than quietly ignored, so a typo does not hand you a file missing pages you thought you had asked for.

Are the pages re-rendered?

No. The pages you keep are copied across whole, so text stays selectable and searchable, fonts stay embedded, and images keep their original resolution. The result is a genuine subset of the original document rather than a picture of one. That also means the file does not shrink in proportion to the pages removed: a PDF's fonts and images are often shared across pages, and anything still referenced has to come with you.

Why split a PDF at all?

Usually because something else has a limit. Upload forms cap file sizes, email attachments bounce, and a printer or a print shop may want one chapter at a time. The other common reason is privacy in the plain sense: sending someone the two pages they asked for rather than the forty-page document those pages happen to sit in. Doing that on a server would mean uploading all forty pages to extract two, which rather defeats the exercise.