Odd and even pages
Every other page sounds like an odd thing to want until you need it.
Where this comes from
Odd or even selection is useful when the pages you want alternate throughout the PDF. For example, a double-sided scan may contain a document page followed by a blank reverse side. A form may alternate between instructions and pages to complete.
Check a few thumbnails before choosing. Odd and even refer to positions in this PDF: 1, 3, 5… or 2, 4, 6…. If a scan contains all front sides followed by all back sides, odd/even selection will not put them into reading order. It also does not undo a booklet layout.
What odd and even mean here
They mean the page numbers you can see — 1, 3, 5… and 2, 4, 6… counted from the front of the file. Page 1 is the first page of the PDF.
That is not always the number printed on the paper. A report with a cover and a contents page often has “1” printed on the third sheet, so its printed page 1 is the document’s page 3. Extract Pages counts pages in the file, not numbers printed on them, and this is the most common reason an odd/even selection comes out one off from what someone expected.
Worth knowing: odd and even swap when a cover is added or removed. If a first pass gives you the wrong half, the other one is usually right.
It is a starting point, not the whole answer
Odd or even gets you most of the way and rarely all of it. A scan that jammed once, a document with an inserted page, a bundle where the blank backs stop halfway — in each of those, every-other-page is right for a stretch and wrong after it.
So the useful pattern is: take odd or even as the base, then adjust by hand. Tapping a thumbnail adds or removes exactly that page, and the Pages field shows the result written out, so you can see where the pattern broke rather than counting.
If what you need is the blank pages gone rather than a half kept, work from the other side: select the blank pages yourself and use Invert, and you are left with everything else.
One file, in document order
The result is a single PDF containing the pages you kept, in the order they had in the original. Extracting the even pages of a 40-page scan gives one 20-page file, not twenty files.
Doing it in Extract Pages
- Open the PDF.
- Open the ⋯ menu beside the selection helpers and choose Odd pages or Even pages.
- Adjust by tapping any page that breaks the pattern, then Save.