About Split PDF
Splitting a PDF usually means one of two things: you want a few pages out of a long document, or you want to remove a few pages and keep the rest. Either way the question is the same: which pages do you want to end up with?
This tool answers it with one box. Type the pages you want to keep, as a range, a list, or both, and you get a new PDF containing exactly those pages, in that order. It runs in your browser, so the original never leaves your computer and is never changed.
How to extract pages from a PDF
- Choose the PDF you want to take pages from.
- In the Pages box, write what you want to keep. "1-3" is the first three pages. "7" is the seventh. "1-3, 7, 10-12" is those three groups, one after the other. The box starts with page 1 filled in, so clear it first.
- Press the button. You get a new PDF made only of the pages you named.
- Read the preview before you save. Each page is captioned with where it came from, such as "Was page 7 of 24", which is the quickest way to catch a range that is off by one.
- Save the file. The original is untouched, so you can run the tool again with a different range.
When you would use it
- Sending a client only the pages that concern them out of a long report.
- Pulling the signature page out of a contract so it can be signed and returned on its own.
- Removing a cover sheet, a blank back page or an appendix you do not want to share, by naming everything else.
- Taking one chapter out of a scanned book for a class.
- Cutting a bundle in two by running the tool twice with different ranges.
What it will not do
- One run gives you one file. If you want a document cut into five separate files, run it five times with five ranges.
- The pages come out in the order you wrote them, so "3, 1" produces the third page followed by the first. That is useful for reordering, but it surprises people who expected the original order.
- Splitting does not rewrite what is on the pages. If a page you kept refers to "page 12" and you removed page 12, that sentence is now wrong.
- A password-protected file has to be unlocked first with Unlock PDF.
- It does not erase anything from the pages it keeps. To remove words or numbers from a page, use Redact instead.
How it compares
A print dialog can "print" selected pages to a new PDF, and it works, but it re-renders the pages, which can flatten form fields and change how fonts are embedded. Splitting here keeps the pages you chose as they were, so a page that was selectable text before is still selectable text after.
Several online splitters upload the file and ask for an account before the second use. This one runs in the browser and has no sign-in.
Tips
- To delete pages rather than keep them, write the pages that remain. For a 10-page file where page 4 is blank, "1-3, 5-10" is the whole job.
- If you are unsure of the numbers, open the file in your normal viewer first. The page number in the viewer’s corner is the one this tool uses.