Split PDF: separate pages or extract only the ones you need

Break a PDF into parts, or keep only what you need

A long PDF is convenient for archiving and awkward for almost everything else. You need to send only chapter three and the whole file is too heavy. Your professor asked for the appendix pages only. You scanned twenty documents in one pass and now need them separated. Out of a full contract, only the signature page has to go out.

Splitting a PDF solves all of those, and here you get two modes depending on what you need: break the whole document into single pages, or extract only a specific range.

Split every page

This mode turns each page of the document into an independent PDF and delivers them all together inside a .zip, numbered in order. It's what you want when you scanned several separate documents in one go and now need each on its own, or when you're distributing pages of a handout among several people.

The files are named after the original document and numbered by page, so when you unzip them they're already in the right order and easy to identify without opening them one by one.

Extract specific pages

This mode produces a single PDF with exactly the pages you name. The syntax is simple: individual numbers and ranges with a dash, separated by commas. Typing 1-3, 5, 8-10 gives you a seven-page PDF with pages 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9 and 10, in that order.

Before processing anything, the tool reads how many pages your document has and tells you, so you know the range you're working with. If you ask for a page that doesn't exist, it says so straight away instead of quietly handing you an incomplete file.

Splitting doesn't degrade the document

Just as with merging, pages are copied exactly as they are from the original: not redrawn, not re-encoded. Text stays selectable and searchable, and images keep their exact resolution. The result is indistinguishable from the original except for the missing pages.

Worth keeping in mind if your goal was to reduce weight: extracting half the pages roughly halves the file, but if you need one document to take up much less while keeping all its pages, the right tool is Compress PDF. And to put parts back together afterwards, use Merge PDF.