How to extract specific pages from a PDF

Extract, split or remove?

These three tools overlap enough to be confusing, and picking the wrong one costs you a few minutes of undoing.

Extract and Remove are opposites. If you want to keep 90 of 100 pages, removing 10 is far less typing than extracting 90.

Extracting the pages

Clicking thumbnails is the reliable way when the pages you want are scattered and you are not sure of the numbers. Typing ranges is faster when you know exactly what you need, and much faster for long documents where scrolling through thumbnails is a chore.

1. 1Open the Extract pages tool and choose your PDF.
2. 2Click the page thumbnails you want, or type a range in the box.
3. 3Check the count shown before you confirm — it tells you how many pages the result will have.
4. 4Press Extract and download the new file.

The range syntax

The box accepts a comma-separated list of single pages and ranges. A few examples make it obvious:

Page numbers here mean the position in the file, not the number printed on the page. If your document has a cover and roman-numeral front matter, the page printed "1" may well be file page 9.

Does order matter?

Pages come out in document order regardless of how you type the ranges. Asking for 9,5,1 gives you pages 1, 5 and 9 in that sequence, not reversed.

If you specifically need a different order, extract first and then reorder the result in the Organize tool, where you can drag pages into any arrangement you like.

What extraction preserves

The extracted pages are copied across exactly as they were. Text stays selectable, images keep their original resolution, and nothing is re-compressed — extracting is lossless.

What does not come across is anything that lived at the document level rather than the page level: bookmarks pointing to pages you did not take, and interactive form fields, which frequently break when pages are copied between documents. If your source is a fillable form, fill it before extracting.

File size shrinks roughly in proportion to how many pages you kept, though not exactly — shared resources like embedded fonts are carried over whole.

Common reasons people extract

That last one is worth taking seriously. Sending someone the whole document when you mean six pages of it is a small discourtesy that gets repeated across an organisation thousands of times a year.

1. 1Sending one certificate or invoice out of a combined scan.
2. 2Pulling the signature page out of a contract for countersigning.
3. 3Taking one chapter from a textbook to read on a tablet.
4. 4Separating a passport page from a bundle of identity documents.
5. 5Cutting a 200-page report down to the six pages a colleague actually asked about.

A note on sensitive documents

Extraction is very often used on exactly the documents you would not want on someone else's server: identity papers, medical results, bank statements, contracts. Pulling one page out of a passport scan and uploading the whole scan to do it defeats the purpose entirely.

This runs in your browser, so the document is read on your device and the new file is written on your device. Nothing is transmitted, which you can confirm by loading the page and then disconnecting from the internet before extracting.