How to Extract Only the Pages You Need from a PDF

When extracting pages is the right move

Full documents are often more than the recipient needs. Common cases: sending one chapter of a manual to a colleague, pulling the signed page out of a long contract, submitting a single certificate from a scanned bundle, or quoting three pages of a report in a meeting pack. Extracting gives the other person a short, focused file instead of a 40-page document they must search through.

Extract pages step by step

1. Open the original PDF in your PDF reader and note the page numbers you need. The numbers shown in the reader are the numbers to enter in the tool.
2. Open the free Split PDF tool in your browser.
3. Enter the page range you want — for example pages 3 to 5 — and download the extracted file.
4. Open the downloaded file and check that it starts and ends on the right pages before you send it.

Pages that are not next to each other

Split works by page ranges, so one run covers one continuous range. If you need pages 3 to 5 and also pages 12 to 14, run the tool once for each range. You then have two short files. If the recipient should get them as one document, add both files to the Merge PDF tool, in the order you want them to read, and download the combined file.

Extract first, then merge

Merging joins whole files only, with no per-file page selection. That is why extraction comes first in so many jobs: extract the pages you need from each source file, then merge the extracts. The two-step workflow — split, then merge — is also how you build an application pack from several long documents without sending anything you did not mean to share.

Password-protected PDFs

Password-protected files must be unlocked first in the application that created them. Once the restriction is removed, you can extract pages like you can from any other PDF. No PaperKit tool bypasses a password.