Split a PDF

Three ways to split

By page range — 1-3, 7, 9- produces one file containing exactly those pages. A dash with nothing after it means “to the end”, and one with nothing before it means “from the start”.

Every page as its own file — the usual way to break a scanned batch apart.

Every N pages — for splitting a long document into chapters or chunks of a fixed size. The last file is short if the pages do not divide evenly.

Ranges are checked, not clamped

Ask for 1-20 of a ten-page document and you get an error, not a ten-page file.

That distinction matters. Clamping silently produces a PDF missing pages you asked for and says nothing about it, which you discover later when something is absent. Being told “this document has 10 pages, so 20 does not exist” is the answer you can act on.

Overlapping and out-of-order ranges are merged and sorted, so 7, 1-3, 2-5 becomes pages 1–5 and 7. Duplicates collapse rather than producing the same page twice.

Password-protected files

A PDF with an open password cannot be read here at all — the pages are encrypted, and there is nothing to extract without the password.

The message says so rather than reporting a generic failure. Remove the password in whatever produced the file, then split it.

Note that a PDF with only a permissions password — one that claims to prevent printing or copying but opens without a password — is a different thing, and its pages are not actually encrypted.

What is preserved

Extracted pages keep their content, fonts and dimensions exactly. What does not carry over is document-level structure: bookmarks, the outline, form fields and links pointing to pages outside the extracted range, since those references no longer have anywhere to go.

For splitting a form or a heavily bookmarked document, check the result.

Nothing is uploaded

The file is read and split in this page. Contracts, bank statements and medical records are the documents people most often want to split, and they are exactly the ones not to hand to a website.