Delete Pages

Remove Pages From a PDF

Blank separator sheets from a scanner. A cover page nobody needs. The internal cost breakdown that should not have gone to the client. Name the 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.

That is a deliberate choice for a destructive operation. A tool that arrives with page 1 already ticked is one distracted click away from removing your cover. Here, every page that disappears is one you named.

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, matching your reader's page counter rather than any number printed on the page.

You cannot delete everything

Asking to remove all pages is refused. A PDF with zero pages is technically valid and practically useless — most readers will not open it, and the ones that do show a grey void.

If your intent really is to get rid of the whole document, delete the file.

Pick the shorter list

Deleting and extracting are the same operation seen from opposite ends. The one to use is whichever needs less typing and leaves less room for error.

Removing pages 3 and 17 from a 40-page file: type 3,17 here. Keeping only pages 3 and 17 from that file: use Extract Pages and type the same thing there. Doing either job with the wrong tool means constructing a range like 1-2,4-16,18-40, and that is exactly the sort of expression people fat-finger.

Do not 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 multiple pages, colour profiles — and those stay. If the pages you deleted were mostly text, they were contributing very little to the file size in the first place.

Deleting pages that each carried a large unique scan is the case where the size genuinely drops, and it drops a lot. If size reduction is the actual goal and the maths does not work out, read what Compress PDF does to a document before reaching for it, because the cost there is your text layer.

Redaction is not deletion

This removes whole pages. It does not remove content from a page that stays.

If a sensitive number appears in a paragraph on page 12 and page 12 is going out, deleting pages will not help you. Drawing a black rectangle over it in a PDF editor will not help you either — the text is still in the file underneath, and anyone can select it. Proper redaction removes the underlying content, and it needs a tool built for that.

Related: page loss is permanent once you download the result. Keep the original until you have opened the output and checked it. The removed pages are not recoverable from the new file, because they were never written into it.

Before and after

Reordering what remains is Organize PDF. Combining what remains with other documents is Merge PDF. Encrypted files are rejected at upload; run them through Unlock PDF first.