Split PDF
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When you actually need to split a PDF

The reason is usually small. You need to send a single chapter from a 60-page report to a colleague who doesn't need the other 59. There's one receipt buried in a stack of scanned bills that needs to land in the expense report on its own. A long contract has an exhibit that goes to a different counterparty than the master agreement. A six-month bank statement covers more than the lender wants — they only asked for the last three. In each case the right tool is the inverse of merging: take one PDF, get smaller PDFs back.

The original file on your disk stays untouched. What you download is a fresh copy — or several copies — of just the parts you needed.

Three modes for three different jobs

• All pages — the input becomes one PDF per page. A 30-page document yields 30 separate PDFs. Useful when each page goes to a different person, or when you want to comb through them in your file manager. The downside is 30 download prompts in a row.
• Range — type a "from" and "to" (say, 5 to 12), and the result is a single PDF with exactly those pages. The everyday case: lift out a chapter, isolate an addendum, extract the second half of a scan.
• Selection — click thumbnails to pick pages by hand. The result is a single PDF with only the chosen pages, in their original order. Right when the pages you want aren't contiguous — say, 1, 3, 5, and 12.

The modes are mutually exclusive — pick one, set it up, download. To try a different mode, switch tabs in the toolbar.

What survives the split, and what doesn't

Anything that belongs to the page itself comes through cleanly: text, images, headers and footers, layout, fonts. Annotations on a kept page (highlights, sticky notes, links) ride along with that page. Filled form fields stay filled. A scanned page stays a scanned page — splitting doesn't run optical character recognition (OCR).

Some things to know:

• Bookmarks (the navigation tree) drop. Each output PDF comes out without a table of contents, even if bookmarks pointed into its pages. Known limitation; for the typical use (carve out a chunk to send), the table of contents usually isn't needed downstream.
• Digital signatures invalidate. A signature is bound to the exact bytes of a particular file. Splitting produces a new file, and the original signature no longer matches. If preserving the signature matters — say, an executed loan agreement — don't split the signed version. Split a copy and sign the extract.
• PDF/A status is not preserved. If the source was a long-term-archive PDF/A, the pieces come out as ordinary PDFs.
• Page numbers in headers and footers don't renumber. If page 27 of the original said "Page 27 of 60" in its footer, the extracted single-page PDF says the same thing. The tool copies content; it doesn't rewrite it.

Practical notes

1. If the PDF is password-protected, unlock it first. Send the file through unlock-pdf before splitting — encrypted files can't be opened to extract pages from.
2. For very large PDFs (hundreds of megabytes), splitting still happens in the browser. Browser memory is the cap. On a desktop this rarely matters; on a phone, a 500 MB scan can run out of room. If it does, switch to a desktop browser to do the split.
3. "All pages" mode triggers a download per page. Most browsers ask once and then auto-allow the rest, but on the first run you may have to permit multiple downloads. If your browser is blocking them, use range mode and pull pages out in groups instead.
4. To recombine after splitting, the inverse is merge-pdf. To reorder pages inside one PDF without splitting at all, see organize-pdf.

When splitting isn't the right move

• If you only want to remove a few pages, splitting and rejoining works but is overkill. delete-pdf-pages does it directly: pick the pages to drop and download what's left.
• If you need to reorder, not extract, see organize-pdf — it's the page-reordering tool for a single file.
• If you only need the text of a single page, converting that page to JPG or pulling its text out is often more useful than carrying the PDF wrapper around. See pdf-to-jpg or pdf-to-txt.

What happens to your file

Everything runs in your browser, on your device. Open DevTools, switch to the Network tab, and drop a file in: you won't see any outgoing requests carrying its contents. That matters for contracts with personal data, internal documents, medical reports — for any file you'd rather not send through an outside service.