Taking a few pages out to send someone
Pulling three pages out of a forty-page PDF is the easy half. The half worth thinking about is what those three pages should be when they land in somebody else's inbox: a small PDF they can search and print, or pictures they can see without opening anything. This page covers that choice, and the one thing a part of a document always loses.
Which tool you need
One PDF holding the pages you picked
Extract PDF pages. Every page starts chosen, so clear the lot and tick the few you want, or type the numbers straight in as something like 1-4, 7. The count beside the button says how many pages the new file will hold.
Pictures somebody can look at without opening a document
PDF to JPG, or PDF to PNG for text and line art, which stays crisp where a JPG goes soft. Pictures cannot be searched or selected, so send them when being seen matters more than being read.
A separate file for every page or every range
Split PDF. Extracting always produces one document, however many pages you tick.
Everything except a few pages
Delete PDF pages, which is this job from the other end and far fewer presses when most of the document is staying.
The pages are right but the file is too big to email
Compress PDF on the extracted file. A few pages out of a picture-heavy document can still be several megabytes, because the pictures came across untouched.
What a part of a document loses
Keep every page and everything comes across. Leave one out and the document becomes a new document, which costs it bookmarks, form fields and the tagged reading order — and every link that jumped from one page to another stops working, including links between the pages you kept.
A digital signature stops being valid for the same reason: the file is not the file that was signed. None of this is avoidable in any tool, anywhere, that writes fewer pages than it read.
One thing is taken out deliberately rather than lost: an action attached to a page or a note, of the kind that could run a program, send a form somewhere or open another file, does not come across. That is a safety decision about a document you are about to pass on.
Picking the pages without scrolling for ten minutes
The previews start fully selected, which is the right default for a short document and the wrong one for a long one. Clear, then tick, is quicker past about a dozen pages.
Quicker still on a long document is the Pages field above the previews: type the numbers and ranges the way you would say them, and the previews follow. That is also the only way to pick pages reliably on a phone.
What to know before you start
- Extracting always makes one document. There is no option for a file per page here; that is what splitting is.
- A locked PDF cannot be read. Extract stops and says the document needs a password, and Unlock PDF is where you give it one.
- The file you opened is not altered, so a second set of pages can be extracted straight afterwards without opening it again.