How to extract pages from a PDF
· 5 minute read
Pull a few pages out of a long PDF, remove pages you do not want, or cut a bundle in two. How page ranges work, and the off-by-one mistakes to check for.
Most of the PDFs people send are longer than they need to be. A 60-page report goes to someone who only needs the summary. A contract goes out with a page of internal notes still in it. A scanned book arrives as a single file when you only wanted chapter three. In each case the fix is the same: make a new file with only the pages you want.
Writing a page range
Page ranges are the one piece of syntax worth knowing. A dash means "through", so 3-6 is pages three, four, five and six. A comma separates groups, so 1-2, 5, 9-11 is those three groups, in that order. A single number is a single page.
- "1-5" keeps the first five pages.
- "7" keeps only page seven.
- "1-3, 8-10" keeps two groups and drops everything between them.
- "3, 1, 2" produces the third page first, then the first and second, which is also a way to reorder.
Deleting pages is the same as keeping the rest
There is no separate delete function, because it is not needed. If you want to remove page 4 from a 10-page document, keep everything else: "1-3, 5-10". It feels backwards the first time, and then it does not.
The off-by-one problem
The most common mistake is the page number. The number printed in the corner of a page is often not the page’s position in the file. A document with a cover and an unnumbered contents page might start printing "1" on the third page. A tool counts from the first page of the file, so the printed "5" can be position 7.
The way to avoid this is to check the page count that your viewer shows, which is usually in a box at the top or bottom of the window, and use that. The better fix is to use a tool that shows you what it did. If the preview labels each page of the result with where it came from, such as "Was page 7 of 24", a wrong range is obvious before you save.
One file or several
Extracting gives you one new file made of the pages you named. If you want a document cut into several separate files, you run it several times with different ranges. If you want to put pieces back together afterwards, that is what Merge PDF is for.
Extracting is not the same as removing
A new file with fewer pages is not a safe way to hide information that is on the pages you kept. If a page you kept has a name or a figure that must not leave your hands, extracting does nothing about it. For that you need real removal, which is what Redact does: it deletes the words from the page and not just from view.
Extracting also leaves the original alone. That is useful, because it means you can run it again with a different range if you got the first one wrong.