How to pull specific pages out of a PDF
Three different jobs get called the same thing, and picking the wrong one is how people end up with forty files they did not want. Which tool does what.
Skip to the toolExtract PagesYou need pages 4 to 9 of a contract. Or everything except the covering letter. Or each chapter as its own file. These sound like one task and are three, and the tools have different names for good reasons.
Extracting: keep some pages, in one file
This is the one people usually mean. You want a new PDF containing only the pages you named, in one document. Pages 4 to 9 of the contract, as a single six-page file you can send.
Keep only the pages you name
The original is untouched, which is worth saying because it is not true of every tool that does this. You get a new file and keep the old one.
Removing: keep everything else
The mirror image, and often the easier way to describe what you want. Instead of listing the twenty pages to keep, list the two to drop. Same result, far less typing, far less chance of a mistake.
Drop the pages you do not want
Splitting: one file becomes many
Splitting is the one that surprises people. It does not give you a selection — it breaks the document into several files. Useful for turning a bound report into one file per chapter, or a batch of scanned invoices into one file each.
If you wanted six pages in one document and you reach for split, you will get six documents. That is the mistake worth avoiding, and it is entirely a naming problem rather than a tool problem.
Break one file into several
Page numbers here mean the position in the file, not whatever is printed on the page. A report whose first page is numbered i, or whose numbering restarts at each chapter, still counts 1, 2, 3 from the front.
Common questions
Does extracting reduce the file size?
Usually, but by less than you would expect. Fonts, images and other resources are often shared across the whole document, so six pages out of sixty rarely gives you a tenth of the size. If size is the goal, compress afterwards.
Can I extract pages from a password-protected PDF?
Not while it is protected. Remove the password first if you know it — a document you cannot open is a document nothing can restructure.
Will links and bookmarks survive?
Links within a page survive. Bookmarks and links pointing at pages you did not keep necessarily do not, since their destination no longer exists.
Is there a limit on file size?
Only your device's memory, because the work happens there rather than on a server. Very large scanned documents are the practical limit, and that limit is usually generous.
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