PDF Page Extractor: Split, Reorder and Merge by Range

What does extracting pages from a PDF do?

It writes a new PDF containing only the pages you named, in the order you named them. The original file is untouched, and each page keeps its own size, orientation and content exactly as it was.

The work is done by pdf-lib running in this page. Your file is read into memory and rewritten there, never sent to a server, so contracts and payslips are as safe here as they are in the folder you opened them from.

How do you use it?

1. On the Join tab, add two or more PDFs, drag them into the order you want and press Join
2. On the Split tab, choose one PDF and type the pages you want, for example 1-3,5
3. Or press Split every page into its own file to get one file per page as a zip

How is the page range written?

Numbers and ranges separated by commas. 1-3,5 on a 6-page document gives pages 1, 2, 3, and 5. Because the pages come out in the order you typed them, 5,1-2 gives 5, 1, and 2 — the same box that extracts also reorders.

Two more rules follow from the same parser. A trailing hyphen means to the end, so 3- gives 3, 4, 5, and 6. And a page named more than once is only included once, so 2,2,2 gives a 1-page file, not a 3-page one — duplicating a page is not something this tool can do.

What happens to Letter and A4 pages in the same file?

They stay different sizes. Joining does not normalise anything: a US Letter page (216 × 279 mm) and an A4 page (210 × 297 mm) sit in one document at their own dimensions, and a printer will either scale each one to the tray or leave you with mismatched margins. If the mix matters, fix it in whatever produced the pages, not here.

This is a feature more often than a problem. A scanned receipt keeps its scanned size when you staple it onto a report, rather than being stretched to match.

What is lost when you split or join?

Everything that belongs to the document rather than to a page. Bookmarks, form field values, attachments, document properties and digital signatures do not survive; page content does.

Two of those have practical consequences. A filled form comes out blank, so print it to PDF first to flatten the values into the page. And a signature covers a hash of the whole file, so it is necessarily invalid once the file changes — that is the signature working correctly, not a fault in the tool.

Why will it not open my password-protected PDF?

Because an encrypted PDF's page structure cannot be read without the password, and this tool never asks for one. Open the file where you know the password, remove the protection, save an unprotected copy and use that.

Nothing is bypassed here and nothing is sent anywhere to be bypassed. A tool that offered to strip the password would have to do the work somewhere, and that somewhere would be a server.

Notes

• Joining keeps files in the order shown; reorder them with the arrows before pressing Join
• Splitting every page gives a zip named page-1.pdf and so on, or a single PDF if the document has only one page
• There is no size limit, but everything runs in the tab's memory, so a few hundred megabytes will feel slow
• Building the PDF from images or tiles instead? The photo sheet layout tool and the poster tiler both output PDFs you can then join here
• The page works offline once loaded, because nothing about it needs a server

Where these figures come from

The rules and figures this page relies on come from the sources below (links checked 25 September 2026).

• ISO 32000-1:2008, Document management — Portable document format — Part 1: PDF 1.7 — Adobe Systems (free copy of the ISO-adopted specification)
• ISO 216:2007, Writing paper and certain classes of printed matter — Trimmed sizes — A and B series — International Organization for Standardization
• ASME Y14.1, Drawing Sheet Size and Format — The American Society of Mechanical Engineers

What can change: Paper standards change rarely; PDF 2.0 (ISO 32000-2) supersedes the 2008 edition linked here without altering how signatures cover the whole file.