Take Only the Pages You Need
Splitting is what you reach for when a fifty-page report contains the three pages you actually have to send. Printing the range to a new PDF flattens the text into a picture of text; doing it in a cloud tool means handing over the other forty-seven pages as well, which rather defeats the point of only sending three.
Here you see every page as a thumbnail, click the ones you want, and get a new PDF containing exactly those. If you already know the numbers, the range box accepts the usual shorthand and saves you the clicking.
How to Extract Pages from a PDF
There are two ways to choose pages, and you can mix them freely.
- Drop your PDF onto the box above, or click to select it. The page count appears immediately, and thumbnails fill in as they render.
- Click the pages you want to keep. A selected page gets a coloured border and a tick; clicking again removes it from the selection.
- Or type a range such as 1-3, 5, 8-10 into the range box and press Select range. This replaces the current selection rather than adding to it.
- Use Select all and Clear selection when it is quicker to start from one extreme, Select all then deselect three pages beats clicking forty-seven.
- Check the counter, which shows how many pages are currently selected and therefore how many will be in the output.
- Press Extract pages and download the result. Your original file is untouched, so you can extract a different set immediately.
How the Range Box Works
The range box understands single pages and spans separated by commas, so 1-3, 5, 8-10 selects eight pages in total. Spaces are ignored, and a reversed span like 10-8 is read the same as 8-10, which means a range pasted from somewhere else usually still does what you meant.
Numbers outside the document are skipped rather than treated as an error. Typing 1-100 on a twelve-page file selects all twelve, which is a convenient way to say "everything from here on" without counting. Anything the parser cannot make sense of is simply ignored, so a stray word in the box will not stop the rest of the range from working.
Range Syntax Examples
Every one of these is valid input for a twelve-page document.
| You type | Pages selected | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | 3 | A single page |
| 1-3 | 1, 2, 3 | An inclusive span |
| 1-3, 7 | 1, 2, 3, 7 | Commas combine spans and singles |
| 10-8 | 8, 9, 10 | Reversed spans are read in order |
| 1-100 | 1 through 12 | Out-of-range numbers are clipped |
| 2, 2, 2 | 2 | Duplicates collapse to one page |
| 0 | nothing | Page numbering starts at 1 |
Extracted pages always come out in document order, whatever order you selected or typed them in. To rearrange them, run the result through the Organize PDF Pages tool afterwards.
What the Extracted File Contains
The result is an ordinary PDF holding the pages exactly as they were, at their original sizes and rotations. Text stays selectable and searchable, links keep working, and fonts and images are carried over rather than redrawn, so the extract is visually identical to those pages in the original.
The output is not proportionally smaller than the source. Three pages out of fifty rarely produce a file that is six per cent of the size, because resources shared across the document, an embedded font family, a colour profile, a logo used in the header, still have to travel with whichever pages use them. If size is the goal, follow up with the PDF Compressor.
Extracting Without Sharing the Rest
The reason to extract pages is often that the rest should not be seen. A single payslip from a year of statements, one clause from a contract, the vaccination page of a medical record: in each case the pages you are removing are more sensitive than the ones you are keeping.
Sending the whole document to a server in order to get three pages back is the opposite of what you set out to do. This tool never transmits the file. It is read into your browser, the pages you chose are assembled into a new document there, and both the original and the discarded pages stay on your machine.