How to pull out only the pages you need from a PDF
Pull a few pages out of a long PDF and send just those: how to write page ranges, the mistakes people make most often, and what happens to links and signatures.
When this is the right move
A landlord wants page 1 and page 6 of your employment contract. An accountant needs the two pages of your bank statement that show one payment. A teacher wants chapter 3 of a long handout. In each case, sending the whole file shares more than you need to and makes the recipient hunt for the right page.
Extracting creates a new PDF with only the pages you choose. The original stays untouched.
How to do it
Open Split PDF and drop in the PDF. Then either tap the page thumbnails you want, or type the pages into the box, and choose Extract pages into one PDF. The tool shows how many pages will be saved before you press Split PDF.
It works the same on a phone: pick the file from your Files app or downloads, tap the pages, and save.
Writing page ranges
The box understands the usual shorthand:
5is a single page.2-4is pages 2, 3 and 4.1, 3, 7is three separate pages.8-is page 8 to the end, so you don’t need to know how long the file is.1-3, 10-12combines both styles.
Commas, spaces, Japanese and Chinese punctuation such as 、 and ， and different kinds of dashes (–, —, ~) are all accepted, so text copied from an email usually works as it is.
The mistakes we see most
- Printed page numbers are not PDF page numbers. A report whose first pages are numbered i, ii, iii has its “page 1” somewhere around PDF page 5. The tool counts physical pages: 1 is always the first page in the file. Check the thumbnail before you rely on a number.
- Asking for a page that doesn’t exist. If the file has 12 pages,
10-14is rejected with a note telling you the page count. - Expecting a tiny file. From a 100-page test file of 1,260 KB, 10 pages came out at 743 KB, not a tenth. Pages can share fonts and images with the rest of the document, and those come along.
- Wanting a different order. Extracting keeps pages in their original order. To reorder, extract first and then rearrange in Organize PDF Pages.
Links, bookmarks and signatures
Extracted pages are copied exactly, so text stays selectable and images keep their quality. A few things can’t come along:
- Bookmarks and internal links that point to pages you left out are dropped.
- A digital signature applies to the original document as a whole, so it isn’t valid in an extract. If the signature matters, ask whether the recipient will accept the full signed file instead.
If you need to add the extracted pages to other documents, combine them with Merge PDF.