Delete pages from a PDF

How to remove pages from a PDF

1. Drop your PDF into the box above, or click it to pick a file.
2. Use Page range to enter From/To pages, or switch to Pick pages and click the sheets you want removed. For double-sided scans with blank backs, the Even shortcut selects every second page.
3. Press Remove pages. The result line tells you how many pages were removed and how many are left.
4. Download the new file. It keeps the original name with a -removed suffix, so report.pdf becomes report-removed.pdf. Your original file is not changed.

Delete, extract, split or crop?

Four tools here change which pages you end up with, and the right one depends on what is shorter to describe and what you need to be gone.

• Delete pages (this page) — you know what has to go: a cover sheet, blank backs, one appendix. Keep 198 of 200 pages by naming the two you do not want.
• Extract pages — you know what has to stay, and it is a small part: page 4 of a statement, the signed page of a contract. Extract also lets you reorder.
• Split a PDF — you want a long document cut into several parts, one run per part, with large page previews to work from.
• Crop PDF is not a way to remove anything. It changes the visible frame of every page; the content outside the frame is still in the file. To hide part of a page for real, use Redact PDF.

Does deleting pages make the PDF smaller?

It depends on where the file’s weight is, so we measured it. A script builds two test documents and deletes pages from each with the same qpdf engine and the same page list this tool sends: a 20-page text report where every page shows the same letterhead image, and a 10-page bundle of scanned sheets, each one its own image.

Removing half the scans halves the file, because each scan is stored with its own page. Removing half the report saves only a quarter: the letterhead image is stored once and shared by every page, so it stays in full as long as a single page uses it. Embedded fonts behave the same way in real office documents. So if you are deleting pages to get under an email or upload limit, delete first and then run Compress PDF on the result.

Writing the page list

You cannot delete every page: at least one has to stay, and the tool says so instead of producing an empty file.

Why delete pages in the browser?

People remove pages for a reason: a salary line in a bank statement, an address on a scanned form, an internal appendix that should not go to the client. Sending the whole document to someone else’s server to strip that page means the page you wanted to keep private is the first thing that leaves your hands.

Here your browser does the work. qpdf copies the pages you keep into a new document in memory and hands you the download; the file is not sent anywhere for processing, and there is no server-side quota — very large PDFs are limited by the memory your device can spare.