About Split PDF
Splitting takes the pages you name out of a PDF — a single page, a range like 1-3, or a scattered selection such as 2, 5, 9-12 — and writes them into a new file. You can keep the selection together as one document or turn every page into its own file, delivered as a ZIP. Like the rest of these tools it runs in your browser, so the original never leaves your device.
How to use
- Choose or drag in the PDF you want to split.
- Type the pages to keep, using commas for single pages and hyphens for ranges.
- Pick whether the result is one PDF or a separate PDF for each page.
- Press the button and your extract downloads immediately.
Page ranges, and how to write them
The selection box accepts any mix of single pages and ranges separated by commas. "1-3, 7, 10-12" keeps the first three pages, page seven, and pages ten through twelve — nine pages in total, in document order. Spaces are ignored, so type it however reads clearly to you.
Page numbers here are the physical positions in the file, counting the very first page as 1. That is not always the number printed on the page: a report with a cover and two front-matter pages will show "1" on what is physically page 4. Scroll to the page in your reader and use the position it reports, not the printed folio.
Selections are always written out in ascending order, and a page named twice is only included once. If you need pages in a different sequence, extract them and reorder the result with the Merge PDF tool.
Why a two-page extract is not tiny
The most common surprise when splitting is file size. Pull two pages out of a 40 MB report and the result may still be several megabytes, because each page carries its dependencies with it: embedded fonts, colour profiles, and any image the page draws.
Fonts are the usual culprit. A subset of a single typeface can run to hundreds of kilobytes, and a page using four weights of a font family drags all four along. Scanned documents behave differently — there the size follows the images almost exactly, so a 2-page extract from a 100-page scan really is about a fiftieth of the original.
If size is what you are chasing rather than page count, converting the extract to images with PDF to JPG, or re-exporting through a print-to-PDF driver, will usually do more than splitting alone.
One file or many
The single-PDF option suits the everyday case: sending a colleague only the pages that concern them, keeping the signature pages of a long contract, or trimming a scan down to the useful sheets.
The separate-files option is for bulk work — turning a merged batch of invoices back into one file per invoice, or preparing pages for an upload form that only accepts single-page documents. Files come back as a ZIP with zero-padded names such as report-page-01.pdf, so they stay in order in any file manager.
Both options leave the original untouched on your disk. Nothing is overwritten, so there is no risk in experimenting with a range until the extract looks right.
Frequently asked questions
How do I extract a single page from a PDF?
Type just that page number in the selection box — for example 7 — leave the output on "One PDF", and the tool produces a one-page file.
Can I split a PDF into individual pages at once?
Yes. Leave the selection covering the whole document and choose "A separate PDF per page". Every page becomes its own file and they arrive together in a ZIP.
Why is my extracted PDF almost as large as the original?
Each page carries the fonts, colour profiles and images it uses, and those are copied with it. Text-heavy documents with several embedded fonts often produce extracts that seem disproportionately large; scanned documents shrink roughly in line with the page count.
Does splitting change the original file?
No. The original stays exactly as it is on your device — the tool only reads it and writes new files to your downloads folder.