How to delete pages from a PDF
Remove blank scans, cover sheets or whole appendices, and get back a shorter document.
Duplex scanners produce blank pages. Contracts arrive with internal routing sheets attached. Reports carry appendices that nobody outside the team should see. In each case you want the same thing: the same document, minus a few pages.
There are two ways to express that, and picking the right one saves a lot of clicking.
The steps
- Upload the document.
- Pick the pages to delete — click thumbnails or type a list like 2,5-7.
- Run the tool and download the result.
Delete or extract — whichever list is shorter
Delete Pages removes what you select. Extract Pages keeps what you select and discards the rest. They reach the same destination from opposite directions.
If you have a 200-page document and want to drop three pages, delete them. If you want to keep three pages out of 200, extract instead. Choosing the shorter list means less typing and far less chance of a mistake.
Writing a page list
Commas separate individual pages and hyphens describe ranges, so 2,5-7 means pages 2, 5, 6 and 7. Page numbers refer to the document's physical page order, which is not always the number printed on the page — a report with roman-numbered front matter will be off by however many pages that runs to.
When in doubt, use the thumbnails. Clicking the page you can see removes any ambiguity about what page 12 means.
Nothing is destroyed
The tool writes a new file and leaves your upload untouched, so a mistake costs you a re-run rather than your document. A PDF must retain at least one page, so a selection that would empty the file is refused rather than silently ignored.
