How to extract pages from a PDF
- Drop your PDF Every page appears as a thumbnail.
- Click the pages to keep. Consecutive or scattered, it makes no difference. Selected pages light up.
- Click Extract, then Download. Out comes a new PDF holding just those pages.
Send the page, not the document
People rarely want the whole file: they want the signature page of a 40-page contract, or one month out of a year of statements. Sending just that keeps the rest to yourself. Picking by thumbnail helps too: you can see the page instead of hoping "12–14" is the right range.
Want several files out of one document, chapter by chapter or every N pages? That's Split PDF. And if you're throwing out a few pages rather than keeping a few, use Delete pages instead.
Why the extract isn't as small as you expected
Pull three pages out of a 200-page report and the result is often far larger than three two-hundredths of the original. This surprises people, and occasionally worries them, so here is the reason.
A PDF stores shared things once and refers to them from wherever they are needed. A font used on every page is embedded a single time. So is a logo in the letterhead, or a colour profile, or an image that appears in a repeated header. When pages are extracted, everything those pages depend on has to come with them, and an embedded font subset can easily be a few hundred kilobytes on its own. Three pages that reference four typefaces carry all four into the new file.
The result is correct, just not proportional to the page count. If the size matters, run the extract through Compress PDF, which is the tool that actually addresses size rather than page count.
What comes across, and what doesn't
The pages arrive whole: text stays selectable, images keep their original quality, form fields and their values come along, and annotations stay attached to the pages they were on. Nothing is re-rendered, so extraction is lossless.
Document-level features follow different rules, and it pays to know them before you send the file on:
- Bookmarks are a property of the document, not of a page. A short extract generally arrives without the outline.
- Internal links that pointed to a page you didn't extract have nothing left to point at. Links to pages inside the selection are fine; links to the rest go dead.
- Page numbers printed on the page are part of the page image and come across unchanged, so an extract of pages 40–42 still says 40, 41, 42 on it. If you need it renumbered from one, Add page numbers will restamp it.
Document metadata travels too, which catches people out when the reason for extracting was to share less: the title, author, subject and keywords are carried over deliberately, so a three-page extract of a report still names whoever wrote the report. If the extract is going outside your organisation, strip the metadata before you send it.
Frequently asked questions
How do I extract pages from a PDF?
Drop the PDF above, click the thumbnails you want to keep, click Extract. The new file lands in your downloads a second later.
Can I extract non-consecutive pages?
Click whatever combination you like. Pages 2, 7 and 30 come out as a three-page PDF in document order. No range syntax to learn.
Does the original PDF change?
Not at all. Extraction writes a brand new file and leaves the source alone, so you can pull a different set a minute later.
Is my document uploaded?
No. The copying happens on your own machine, which matters when the pages you're pulling come out of a contract or a medical record.