Split PDF and take out pages

What Split PDF does, and when you need it

Split PDF makes new PDFs from the pages of one PDF. Take out just the pages you need, cut the file into parts by page ranges, or save every page as a PDF of its own. Each page is copied exactly as it is, so nothing loses quality, and it all happens in your browser: nothing uploaded, no sign-up, no watermark. Your original file is never changed.

"Extract pages" and "split a PDF" are two names for the same job, and this tool does both. People use it for:

• Applications and forms. A job, exam, college or visa portal wants one certificate, and yours is page 7 of a PDF of all your papers.
• Bank statements. A loan or visa office wants three months, not the whole year, and the rest of your transactions can stay with you.
• ID copies. One scan holds your Aadhaar card, PAN card and passport, and a form wants each as a separate file.
• Reports and invoices. Send each team its own section of a report, or each client their own invoice from a batch printed as one file.
• Scanned books and notes. Cut a textbook or a term's notes into one PDF per chapter.
• Legal papers. Share the signed page or one annexure of an agreement without the whole bundle.

Step by step: how the splitter works

1. Choose your PDF. Press "Choose a PDF file", drop the file anywhere on this page, or paste it. The splitter takes one PDF at a time: if you drop several, it uses the first.
2. Look at your pages. The file's name, page count and size appear at the top, and each page appears as a card labelled Page 1, Page 2 and so on. The pictures appear as the cards come into view.
3. Choose "Split how": Pick pages, By range or Every page. A line under the switch says what each one does.
4. Choose the pages by clicking cards or typing numbers. The line under the box says how many pages or parts you have, or what is wrong.
5. Press the yellow button. It says exactly what you will get, like "Save 3 pages as one PDF" or "Split into 4 PDFs", and stays in view at the bottom of the screen.
6. Download. A bar shows the work, then a row shows the new file's name, its size, the time taken, "nothing uploaded" and a Download button. Several new PDFs come together in one ZIP file.

Change anything afterwards and the result goes away while the button comes back, so your download always matches what you see. To start on another file, press "Split a different PDF" under the pages.

Three ways to split, and when to use each

The "Split how" switch offers three ways:

A single new PDF comes as it is, not in a ZIP.

Pick pages is the default. Click a card to pick it, and it gets a yellow border and a tick; click it again to unpick it. To pick a run, click the first page, then hold Shift and click the last. Shift-clicking a picked page unpicks the run instead. Or type the pages in the "Pages to take out" box, like 1-3, 5: the box and the cards follow each other. "All" picks every page and "None" clears them. Under "Save them as", One PDF keeps the picked pages together in page order, and A PDF per page makes a file for each one.

By range cuts the file into parts. Type them in the "Parts, each one a new PDF" box, like 1-3, 4-6, 7-10, and each part becomes its own PDF, in the order you typed. The box starts with the file cut into two halves, such as 1-5, 6-10 for a 10-page file. Each card shows the number of its part, in that part's colour. Pages in no part are dimmed and left out. Parts may overlap: a page in two parts goes into both PDFs, and its card shows 1+2.

Or cut every N pages fills in the parts for you: type a number and press Cut. Every 3 pages of a 10-page file gives 1-3, 4-6, 7-9 and 10, and you can still edit the parts by hand.

Every page needs no choices: a 20-page file gives 20 PDFs. A one-page PDF can't be split any further, and the button says so.

How to type page numbers

Both boxes read page numbers the same way:

• One number is one page: 5.
• A hyphen joins a run: 2-6 is pages 2 to 6. Leave no spaces around it.
• Commas or spaces separate the parts: 1-3, 5 and 1-3 5 mean the same.
• Open ends: 8- is page 8 to the end, and -3 is pages 1 to 3.
• Past the end: a run stops at the last page, so 15-99 in a 20-page PDF is pages 15 to 20.

Numbers count from the first page of the file, like the cards. They can differ from the numbers printed on the pages, since a book's cover and contents often have none, or use i, ii, iii.

When a list can't work, a red line under the box says why, and the button waits with "Check the page numbers" (or "Check the parts"):

• This PDF has 4 pages, so there is no page 9. The file is shorter than you thought: its page count is next to its name.
• "3-1" runs backwards: write the smaller page first. Type 1-3. To reorder pages, use Organize PDF.
• "abc" isn't a page or a range, like 4 or 2-6. Use only numbers, hyphens, commas and spaces. If it names a lone hyphen, remove the spaces around it.
• Pages start at 1. There is no page 0.

Real results from our tests

We split these files in Chromium 141, the open-source browser Google Chrome is built on, on a Linux computer with 4 processor cores and 16 GB of memory. Times are what the page reported; your device may be faster or slower.

• 0.5 sto take 5 pages out of a 117-page textbook
• 354 KBfor those 5 pages, from a book of 5.07 MB
• 0 bytesof your PDF sent to any server
• 3ways to split: pick pages, ranges or every page

A few pages from a long book make a small file, because only what those pages need is copied: their text, fonts and pictures. Fonts and pictures used only by other pages are left behind. Every page on its own works the other way: each new PDF needs its own copy of the fonts its page uses, so a text book cut into single pages can add up to more than the original: our 5.07 MB textbook became 117 PDFs of 29.4 MB in all. The pages of a scan are separate pictures that share almost nothing, so its parts add up to about the size of the original.

Each half of the textbook kept the bookmarks for its own pages, 17 and 18 of the 35, and the links that lead within the same half or to websites, 316 of 509, still worked. The 193 links into the other half were removed. Splitting a two-page form into single pages kept each page's 8 fields, still fillable. We drew every page of every new PDF and compared it with the page it came from: all of them matched. The largest file we split was a 1,000-page scan of 1.11 GB: its first 10 pages came out as an 11.4 MB PDF in 22.0 seconds, with the browser using about 2.7 GB more memory than when idle.

Common jobs, step by step

One certificate out of a combined file. A college form wants only your Class 12 marksheet, which is page 7 of the PDF of all your certificates. Click that card, leave "Save them as" on One PDF and press "Save page 7 as a PDF". You get certificates-page-7.pdf, ready to upload. If the form sets a size limit too, see After splitting.

Part of a bank statement. Type the pages that cover the months asked for, like 1-6, check the picked cards and save them as one PDF. Statements sent by email are sometimes locked: see Locked and signed PDFs.

A scanned book into chapters. Choose By range and type each chapter, like 1-24, 25-51, 52-80. The coloured numbers on the cards show where each part starts and ends, so you can check before you split.

Forms scanned in one go. If each form is two pages long, choose By range, type 2 next to "Or cut every" and press Cut. Each form becomes its own PDF.

One file per page for a portal. When a portal wants your ID, address proof and certificates as separate uploads, choose Every page, or pick the pages you need and choose A PDF per page. Before you upload, rename each file, like documents-page-1.pdf, to say what it is.

Why the pages keep their full quality

Split PDF never draws your pages again or compresses them again. It copies each page into the new PDF as it is stored. The pictures on the cards are only previews, drawn by pdf.js, and play no part in the new file.

• Text stays text: you can still search, select and copy it.
• Scans and photos keep every pixel, so nothing gets blurry.
• Each page keeps its size, crop and rotation, so an A4 page stays A4 and a landscape page stays landscape.
• The new file holds only what its pages need, which is why a few pages from a big book make a small PDF.

Bookmarks, links, forms and the rest

• Bookmarks, the clickable contents in your PDF reader's side panel, stay when they point at pages you keep. Those pointing at pages you left out are removed, and the bookmarks under a removed one move up to take its place. Bookmarks that point nowhere in particular, like a web link, stay unless they were only headings for bookmarks that are all gone.
• Links that lead to pages you kept still work. A link to a page you left out is removed.
• Form fields whose boxes are on kept pages stay. Fields on pages you left out are removed.
• The document's details, such as its title and author, go into every new PDF, along with files attached to the document and its layers.
• Tags and page labels are dropped when pages are left out. Tags are the hidden structure screen readers follow to read a PDF aloud; page labels are custom page numbers, like i, ii, iii. Pick every page as one PDF and the copy keeps both.

Locked and signed PDFs

A password to open. Such a PDF can't be split: next to its name it says "Locked with a password. Unlock it first, then add it again." Remove the password in your PDF reader, then add the unlocked copy.

Editing restrictions. A PDF that opens without a password but is marked against changes is split as normal, and the new PDFs open without those restrictions. The result tells you.

Digital signatures. A signature proves a file hasn't changed since it was signed, and a split copy is a changed file. So the new PDFs no longer carry a valid signature, and the result reminds you. If someone must check the signature, send the original too.

Damaged files say "This file can't be read as a PDF. It may be damaged."

File names, the ZIP and checking the result

New files are named after your PDF and the pages in them. For report.pdf:

• report-page-5.pdf holds page 5.
• report-pages-1-3.pdf holds pages 1 to 3.
• report-pages-1-3_5.pdf holds pages 1 to 3 and page 5, picked into one PDF.
• report-split.zip holds several new PDFs. If two parts hold the same pages, the second gets (2) added to its name.

To open the ZIP on Android, tap it in the Files app and choose Extract. On iPhone and iPad, tap it in the Files app to unpack it into a folder. On Windows, right-click it and choose Extract All; on a Mac, double-click it.

Check before you send. Open the new PDF and look through it: are the right pages there, all of them? Your original is never changed, so if something is wrong, change the pages and split again.

Private: your PDF stays on your device

The pages people split are often private: bank statements, salary slips, Aadhaar and PAN cards, medical reports, contracts. With NoUploadPDF they never leave your phone or computer. pdf.js draws the small pictures of your pages, and our pages engine, written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly, builds the new PDFs in a background worker inside your browser, so the page stays responsive.

The page couldn't upload your file even by mistake: its Content Security Policy tells your browser to block it from sending data to any other site. To check, open your browser's developer tools on a computer (F12 in Chrome or Edge), choose the Network tab and split a file. You will see the page load its own files, and nothing of your PDF sent anywhere. There is no account and no cookies of our own; our privacy policy has the details.

Compared with tools that upload your file

Many online PDF tools upload your file to their servers, split it there and send the parts back. Here is how that compares:

Some upload-based tools promise to delete your files after a while. A file that is never uploaded needs no such promise.

After splitting: merge, organize, compress

Splitting is often one step of a bigger job. These tools work the same private way:

• Merge PDF joins the pages you took out with other files, like a certificate from one PDF and an ID card from another.
• Organize PDF puts pages in a new order and deletes, copies or turns them.
• Rotate PDF turns sideways scans the right way up.
• Compress PDF makes a part smaller for email or upload. Splitting goes by pages, not by size, so this is the next step when a part is still too big.
• Resize PDF fits an exact limit, like under 200 KB, or changes the pages to A4.
• JPG to PDF turns photos of documents into a PDF, ready to split or merge.

Split PDFs on Android, iPhone, Windows and Mac

There is nothing to install: the splitter runs in an up-to-date browser on phones, tablets and computers.

• Android

  Open this page in Chrome, tap "Choose a PDF file" and pick your PDF. Tap pages, or type a run like 5-12. The new file goes to your Downloads folder.

• iPhone and iPad

  Open this page in Safari, tap "Choose a PDF file" and pick a PDF from the Files app. The new file usually goes to Downloads in the Files app.

• Windows, Mac, Linux, Chromebook

  Click "Choose a PDF file", or drag a PDF onto the page. Shift-click picks a run of pages. The new file goes to your Downloads folder.

A touch screen has no Shift-click, so type runs of pages instead. With a keyboard, press Tab to move between pages and Enter or Space to pick one.

Problems and quick fixes

• The button says "Check the page numbers". Read the red line under the box, and see How to type page numbers.
• The wrong pages came out. Numbers count from the file's first page, not the numbers printed on the pages. Check the labels under the cards and split again.
• The pages aren't in the order I typed. Pick pages keeps the original order. By range makes a file per part, in your order. To reorder inside one file, use Organize PDF.
• The new PDF is too big for a form. Put it through Compress PDF, or Resize PDF for an exact limit.
• "These files are too big to handle in this browser's memory." Close other tabs and apps, make fewer files at a time, or use a computer.

Limits

• One PDF at a time. To put pages from several files together, use Merge PDF or Organize PDF.
• By pages, not by size. There is no "split into 5 MB parts": split by pages, then compress or resize each part.
• No automatic chapters. It doesn't cut at bookmarks or headings by itself: type each chapter's range.
• Locked and signed PDFs: a password to open must be removed first, and a signature stops being valid.
• Memory. We set no limit on size or pages, but your device's memory is one, and phones have less than computers.
• One ZIP holds up to 4 GB. For more, split in smaller batches.

Splitting terms, explained

Split

Cutting one PDF into several smaller PDFs, each with some of its pages.

Extract pages

Taking some pages out of a PDF into a new file. The original keeps all its pages.

Page range

A run of pages written with a hyphen, like 4-9 for pages 4 to 9.

ZIP file

One file that holds several others, so they download together.

Bookmarks

The clickable contents a PDF reader shows in its side panel, also called the outline.

Page labels

Custom page numbers stored in a PDF, like i, ii, iii, that some readers show in place of 1, 2, 3.

Tags

Hidden structure that tells screen readers a PDF's reading order, headings and tables.

Digital signature

A seal showing who signed a PDF and that it hasn't changed since. Any change, splitting included, breaks it.