Delete Pages

Remove Pages From a PDF

Maybe it's the blank separator sheets your scanner added, a cover page nobody needs, or the internal cost breakdown that shouldn't have gone to the client. Tell the tool which pages to remove and everything else is written to a new file ending -pages-removed.pdf.

The field starts empty on purpose

Nothing is preselected. You type the pages to delete, and until you do, the button does nothing.

We did that deliberately, because deleting is destructive. If a tool opens with page 1 already ticked, you're one distracted click away from losing your cover. Here, every page that disappears is one you named yourself.

Accepted forms:

3              a single page
2,9,14         several individual pages
20-31          a run
1,4-6,last     mixed
even           every even-numbered page
odd            every odd-numbered page

Numbers count from the start of the file. They match your reader's page counter, so ignore any page number printed on the page itself.

You can't delete everything

If you ask to remove every page, the tool refuses. A PDF with zero pages is technically valid but useless in practice: most readers won't open it, and the ones that do just show a grey void.

If you really want rid of the whole document, delete the file.

Pick the shorter list

Deleting and extracting are the same job approached from opposite ends. Use whichever one needs less typing, since that leaves less room for a mistake.

To remove pages 3 and 17 from a 40-page file, type 3,17 here. To keep only pages 3 and 17, use Extract Pages and type the same thing there. Do either job with the wrong tool and you end up writing a range like 1-2,4-16,18-40, which is exactly the kind of thing people mistype.

Don't expect the file to shrink much

Removing a third of the pages rarely removes a third of the bytes.

The pages you keep still reference the document's shared resources (embedded font subsets, images used on several pages, colour profiles), and those stay in the file. If the pages you deleted were mostly text, they weren't adding much to the size anyway.

The size does drop, and by a lot, when each deleted page carried its own large scan. If what you actually want is a smaller file and the maths doesn't work out, read what Compress PDF does to a document before you use it, because it costs you the text layer.

Deleting a page isn't redaction

This tool removes whole pages. Content on a page you keep stays exactly where it is.

Say a sensitive number appears in a paragraph on page 12 and page 12 has to go out. Deleting pages won't help, and drawing a black rectangle over the number in a PDF editor won't either, because the text is still in the file underneath and anyone can select it. Proper redaction removes the underlying content, and you need a tool built for that.

Once you download the result, the page loss is permanent. Keep the original until you've opened the output and checked it. The removed pages can't be recovered from the new file because they were never written into it.

Before and after

To reorder what's left, use Organize PDF. To combine it with other documents, use Merge PDF. Encrypted files are rejected at upload, so run them through Unlock PDF first.