Split a PDF and take out the pages you need
Open the document, type the pages you want the way you would in a print dialog, and press the button. Those pages are copied into a new PDF in the order you wrote them, or into one file each if you would rather have them separate. What you started with is never altered, and it never leaves the machine you are sitting at: the reading and the writing both happen in this tab.
Take pages out of a PDF
Choose a document, say which pages you want the way a print dialog wants them, and take them out as one new PDF or as one file per page. The document is read and the new one written by this tab, on your own machine, so nothing you split here is uploaded.
The pages are copied across rather than redrawn, so text stays text and a scan keeps every dot it arrived with. Interactive form fields, and links that point somewhere inside the document they came from, are copied as the marks they draw rather than as things you can still fill in or click. Nothing carries over the original's title, author or dates. A document with a password on it is refused rather than opened, and one document stops at 50 MB.
Split a PDF, step by step
- Open the documentUse the button or drop the file on the box. It is checked as it arrives, so something that is not really a PDF, or that has a password on it, is turned away there and then rather than half way through the job.
- Say which pagesType them the way a print dialog wants them, like 1, 4-6, 9. The line underneath counts them back to you as you type, and the pages are laid out above it so you can see which one is which before you commit.
- Take them outOne press gives you a new PDF holding those pages in that order. Tick the box first and you get one file per page instead, each named after the page it came from and numbered so they sort correctly.
Pages are copied with everything they point at, which is why the sizes surprise people
A page inside a PDF is a small dictionary that refers to things stored elsewhere in the file: the fonts it sets its text in, the images it draws, the colour spaces those images are described against, and the stream of drawing operators that puts it all on the paper. Taking one page out means copying every one of those along with it and then writing a fresh cross reference table from the offsets the copies actually landed at, which is what makes the result a document a reader will open rather than a fragment of one. It is also where the file sizes come from. A single page out of a forty page report can be nearly the size of the report if it is the page with the photograph on it, and forty separate files can add up to far more than the original, because each one now carries its own copy of the three fonts they all shared. Nothing is rasterised and nothing is re-compressed at any point in that.
The reason to be careful about which site you use for this is what people actually split. A bank statement, when a landlord wants three months and not three years. The one signed page out of a contract. Two pages of a medical letter for an insurer. A passport scan that arrived stapled to somebody’s covering note. Every one of those is a document you would think twice about emailing, and the ordinary way to split a PDF on the web is to post it to a machine you know nothing about and wait for the answer to come back.
None of that is necessary. Copying pages out of a PDF is reading a file format and writing it back out, and a browser has been able to do both for years. So this one does it where the document already is, in the tab you have open, and the only thing that ever leaves your computer is you choosing to send the result somewhere.
The other half of the job is saying which pages, and it is worth doing properly. Every page of the document is drawn out above the box, numbered, so you are picking from what is actually there rather than from memory. The range syntax is the one your operating system’s print dialog has used for thirty years, because a tool that invents its own notation is a tool you have to learn.
Questions
How do I write the page numbers?
The same way you would in a print dialog. Single pages and ranges, separated by commas, so 1, 4-6, 9 gives you five pages. The order is yours as well, so writing 9, 1 puts page nine first, because a tool that quietly sorted your list would be answering a different question from the one you asked.
Can I get every page as its own file?
Yes, that is the tick box under the range. You get one PDF per page you asked for, each named after the source document with the page number on the end, zero padded so a hundred page document still sorts properly in a folder. There is no zip, so they arrive as individual downloads.
Is the original changed in any way?
Not at all. The file on your disk is read and never written to, and what comes back is a new document assembled beside it. If you decide you took out the wrong pages, change the numbers and press again as many times as you like; nothing accumulates and nothing is lost.
Why is the page I took out nearly as big as the whole document?
Because whatever a page draws travels with it, and a forty page report is very often thirty nine pages of type and one page carrying a photograph. Ask for that page and the photograph comes too. Nothing was added and nothing was recompressed to make it that way; it is simply where the weight was sitting all along.
Other things here
There is a full list on the free tools page. They all work the same way: in the browser, with nothing to install.
The tool is free. So is the thought.
This page did one small job. Edmund is for the thing you thought of while doing it: a capture app for iPhone, iPad and Mac that files a note the moment you have it, so it does not get lost between having it and writing it down.
See what Edmund does