Before you delete pages from a PDF
Deleting pages is the safest-feeling job on this site and the one with the quietest side effects. Your original file is never touched and you cannot end up holding nothing. But the copy you save is a new document, and a few things that lived above the pages do not make it into a new document. This page says which, and when a different tool is the better way round.
Which tool you need
Most of the document stays, a few pages go
Delete PDF pages is the right way round. Select all, Clear and Select the rest are there for working through something long without losing your place.
Most of the document goes, a few pages stay
Extract PDF pages is the same job from the other end, and you will be doing far less clicking. What you get back is a new PDF holding what you picked, in the original order.
The pages you want out are the empty ones from a scan
Remove blank pages finds them for you. Hunting scanner backs by eye through a two-hundred-page document is the part that goes wrong.
You want each piece as its own file
Split PDF. Deleting gives you one document with less in it; splitting gives you several documents.
The pages should move, not go
Organize PDF. It is easy to delete a page meaning to move it, and the page is only recoverable there because your original is still on your device.
What the shorter copy loses
A new document is written, so a digital signature on the original stops being valid on the copy. That is unavoidable in any tool that changes a page count, here or anywhere else.
Leaving any page out also drops bookmarks, form fields and the tagged reading order a screen reader follows. Links that jumped to another page inside the document stop working too — including links to pages you kept, because the page they point at has moved.
None of that matters for a scan or a printout. All of it matters for a form somebody has to fill in, or a report with a contents page, so check the copy before you send it rather than after.
What cannot go wrong
You cannot delete every page: the tool refuses rather than handing you an empty PDF. And you cannot damage what you started with, because the pages you mark are simply left out of the new copy you save.
That means the selection is reversible right up to the download. Bring a page back, look again, take a different one out — nothing is committed until a new file lands on your device.
What to know before you start
- A password-protected PDF is refused rather than trimmed. Take the password off with Unlock PDF first, which is the only tool here that removes one.
- Pages are removed from one document at a time. There is no way to apply the same page removal across a folder of files.
- Nothing is uploaded. Every page is read and the shorter copy written inside your browser, on the device you are using.