Delete Pages from a PDF
Remove the pages you do not want and keep everything else. Say which pages to drop rather than working out which to keep. Runs in your browser with nothing uploaded.
Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded
Naming the pages to remove
Numbers and ranges, separated by commas:
4— drop page four, keep everything else.4, 9-11— drop page four and pages nine through eleven.12-— drop page twelve to the end.-2— drop the first two pages.
Order does not matter, a page named twice is only removed once, and a number past the end of the document is reported rather than quietly ignored. Removing every page is refused, because a PDF with no pages is not a document.
Why not just extract the pages you want?
You can, and Split PDF does exactly that. The difference is arithmetic you should not have to do. Dropping pages 4 and 5 from a ten-page file means extracting 1-3, 6-10, and working that out is easy. Dropping seven scattered pages from a two-hundred-page report is not, and one slip there costs you pages you meant to keep.
This page asks the question the way the job actually arrives. Use Split PDF when you know what you want to keep; use this when you know what you want gone.
Nothing is re-encoded
The pages you keep are copied across whole. Text stays selectable text rather than becoming a picture of text, scanned images keep the exact quality they arrived with, and filled form fields survive. No page is redrawn, rasterised or re-compressed at any point.
Your original is never touched either. The tool reads it and writes a separate document, so the file on your disk is exactly as it was — which is worth knowing before you delete anything you cannot get back.
One thing to check afterwards
Bookmarks and internal links that pointed at a removed page have nowhere left to go, and the document outline is not renumbered to match what survives. For most files nothing visible changes. If yours has a table of contents with working links, open the result and click a couple of them rather than assuming.
Removing pages does not always shrink the file much
A PDF shares resources between pages. A font first used on the page you removed is still embedded if any remaining page uses it, and the same goes for images placed more than once. You get back roughly what those pages genuinely contributed, which is sometimes far less than their share of the page count suggests.
If the goal was a smaller file rather than a shorter one, run the result through Compress PDF.
Frequently asked questions
Why does this ask which pages to remove instead of which to keep?
Because that is how the job is described. Almost every PDF tool implements removal as extraction and leaves you to invert the list yourself — to drop pages 4 and 5 from a ten-page file you have to work out that you want 1-3 and 6-10. That inversion is where mistakes happen, and it gets worse the longer the document. Here you name what goes.
Does removing pages make the file smaller?
Usually, but not proportionally. The removed pages stop being drawn, yet a PDF shares resources across pages — a font used on page 4 is still needed if page 9 uses it too, so it stays. Expect a drop roughly in line with what those pages actually contributed. If size is the real goal, run the result through Compress PDF afterwards.
Does it work on a scanned document?
Yes. Pages are copied whole, whatever is inside them — scanned images, filled forms, vector text. Nothing is re-encoded along the way, so a scan comes out at exactly the quality it went in at, and a page of text stays selectable text rather than becoming a picture of text.
What happens to bookmarks and internal links?
This is the one real caveat. Bookmarks and links that pointed at a removed page have nowhere to go, and the outline is not rewritten to renumber what is left. For most documents that is invisible. If yours depends on a working table of contents, check it after — that is exactly the kind of thing worth verifying rather than assuming. The document’s title, author and dates are dropped too, since the result is a new document rather than an edited one; for a file you are trimming before sending, that is usually what you want.
Can I undo it?
Not from the new file, but you do not need to. Your original is never modified — the tool reads it and writes a separate document, so the file on your disk is exactly as it was. Keep it until you have opened the result and confirmed it is what you wanted.