How to extract pages from a PDF
Most PDFs arrive larger than the part anyone needs. A 60-page contract where the signature block is on pages 3 and 58. A scanned bundle where four of the forty sheets belong to you. A report whose appendix is the only thing worth sending on.
Extracting pages is the answer to that, and it is a smaller operation than it sounds.
What is actually happening
Extract Pages copies the selected pages and the resources needed to display them into a new PDF.
Pages are not converted to images as a whole. Existing selectable text remains selectable, vector drawings stay vectors, and a page’s dimensions and rotation come along unchanged. Extract Pages does not add OCR to image-only scans.
Three ways to say which pages
Point at them. Every page appears as a numbered thumbnail. Tapping one picks it, tapping it again drops it, so a scattered selection is built by pointing at each page in turn. Nothing is selected when you start.
Take a run. Shift-click — or Shift with the arrow keys — takes everything from the last page you touched to the one you just touched. A run of twelve pages is two clicks rather than twelve.
Type it. 3, 18, 42-46 is faster than pointing when you already know the numbers. In long documents, typing page numbers can speed up the selection. Writing a range is covered in selecting PDF pages by range.
All three describe one selection. Whichever you use, the field showing 3, 18, 42-46 and the highlighted thumbnails are the same selection said two ways.
The order is the document’s, not yours
If you pick page 18 and then page 3, the new PDF is 3 then 18. Extract Pages takes pages out; it does not rearrange them, and it does not treat picking order as an instruction about sequence.
If the order is what you want to change, that is a different job — Organize PDF moves pages within one document.
Before you save
The page numbers shown are the document’s own, 1 to N, and the list of what will be saved is on screen the whole time. Check the page list before you save.
Extract Pages V1 does not carry everything the original had into the new file. Form fields, links that point inside the document and bookmarks each behave in a specific way, and what Extract Pages preserves and changes sets out exactly which.
Doing it in Extract Pages
- Open the PDF. It is processed in the browser; it is not uploaded to a server.
- Tap the pages you want, or type them in the Pages field.
- Save downloads the new file. The one you opened is untouched.