Split PDF

How it works

1. 1

   Open your PDF Drop your PDF on the upload area, or click the area to pick it from your device. Every page then shows up as a numbered thumbnail.

2. 2

   Pick a split mode Under Split mode, choose Manual selection, By ranges, All pages or Every N pages. When the file opens, Manual selection is the active mode and no page is selected yet.

3. 3

   Say which pages you want In Manual selection, click the thumbnails or use All and None. In By ranges, type pages such as 1-3, 8. In Every N pages, set Pages per file.

4. 4

   Split and download Press Split and download. For a file named name.pdf, a single result downloads as name_split.pdf, and several results come together in name_split.zip.

The four split modes

• • Manual selection: click the pages you want to keep. The counter shows how many are selected, and they are saved together in one new PDF.
• • By ranges: type single pages and ranges separated by commas, for example 1-3, 7, 10-12. Those pages go into one file. To get a separate file for each part, separate the parts with semicolons instead, as in 1-3; 7.
• • All pages: every page becomes its own PDF, and the files come in a ZIP archive. A one-page document gives a single PDF instead.
• • Every N pages: set Pages per file to cut the document into equal parts. With 3 on a 10-page file, you get pages 1-3, 4-6 and 7-9, plus a last file with page 10.

Page order and file names

Inside each new file, pages always follow their original order, and a page listed twice is included once: typing 5, 1-3 gives pages 1, 2, 3 and 5. To put pages in another order, split first, then rearrange the result with Organize PDF.

Files in a ZIP archive are numbered in the order of the parts, such as report_part1.pdf and report_part2.pdf inside report_split.zip. Pages are not re-rendered or recompressed, so text stays selectable and images keep their quality. Links come along with their page, and a link to a page outside the part, such as a table of contents entry, stays but leads nowhere. Images, fonts and drawings that only pages outside a part use are left out of it, but the other half of a two-page spread stays in the file, out of sight, as does all that a page shares with others when the tool cannot read its content for sure or that content is too large to check, which a message then tells you: keep that in mind before you send one part of a confidential document. A PDF protected by a password is the exception: it is not supported, even when it opens without asking for one, so remove the protection first with Unlock PDF if you know the password. The bookmarks of the original, its layers and its properties, such as the title, do not come along: a hidden layer becomes visible, and a link to a named destination leads nowhere.

Which mode fits your task

• • Send one chapter or a few pages: By ranges, or Manual selection if you prefer to click.
• • Separate documents that were scanned together and have the same number of pages: Every N pages.
• • Share or print pages one by one: All pages.
• • Drop a few pages and keep the rest: Delete PDF Pages lets you select the pages to remove instead of the pages to keep.