How to split a PDF with this tool
Select your PDF and the tool immediately reads how many pages it contains — useful confirmation before you start typing page numbers. Then pick one of three modes depending on what you actually need.
Extract a page range
The most common case: you have a forty-page report and you need pages 12 to 18. Type
12-18 and you get a single new PDF containing exactly those seven pages, in order.
The page field accepts more than one range. Type 1-3, 7, 10-12 and you get a single
file containing pages 1, 2, 3, 7, 10, 11 and 12 — the cover, one key exhibit and the conclusion,
assembled into one document. Page numbers refer to physical positions in the file starting at 1, which
is not always the same as the number printed on the page: a document with roman-numeral front matter
will have its "page 1" somewhere further in. Count from the beginning of the file.
Invalid entries are ignored rather than causing an error. If you ask for pages 50 to 60 of a 20-page document, the tool tells you the range produced nothing valid and reminds you of the real page count.
Split into one file per page
Bursting a document into individual pages is what you want when you need to send different pages to different people, when you are separating a batch of scanned invoices that went through the feeder as one job, or when you need to reorder pages and plan to reassemble them with the PDF merge tool.
Each file is named after the original with the page number appended, so
report.pdf becomes report-page-1.pdf, report-page-2.pdf and so
on. Downloads are spaced a fraction of a second apart because browsers throttle rapid consecutive
downloads. The tool refuses jobs producing more than sixty files, since past that point browsers start
silently dropping downloads and you would not know which pages were missing.
Split into chunks of N pages
The mode for size limits. If an email system or an upload form caps attachments and your 200-page
document will not fit, split it into chunks of 25 pages and send them in sequence. Files are named with
their page range — report-1-25.pdf, report-26-50.pdf — so the recipient can
reassemble them without guessing.
What survives the split
Pages are copied at the object level rather than re-rendered, so nothing degrades. Text stays selectable and searchable, fonts are carried across, vector graphics remain vector, and images are copied without any re-compression. A split page from a scan is exactly as legible as the original.
Page dimensions and rotation are preserved individually, so a mixed portrait-and-landscape document splits correctly. What does not carry over: interactive form fields lose their behaviour, digital signatures are invalidated because the document is no longer the one that was signed, and document-level bookmarks are dropped since most of them would point at pages that are no longer present.
File sizes after splitting
A common surprise: extracting three pages from a 10 MB document does not necessarily give you a 300 KB file. PDFs share resources across pages — fonts, colour profiles, sometimes images used on multiple pages — and any resource a copied page depends on must come with it. If your three pages reference a large embedded font set, that font travels along. The extracted file will still be considerably smaller than the original, just not proportionally so.
Privacy, and why it matters for this specific task
People split PDFs to isolate exactly one thing: the page with the account number, the page with the diagnosis, the signature page of a contract. Those are the pages you least want passing through someone else's server. This tool never transmits your file. Load the page once and you can disconnect from the internet entirely — the split will still work, which is the clearest possible proof that nothing is being sent.