Delete PDF pages

Removing pages, not rebuilding the document

This copies the pages you are keeping into a new document and leaves out the ones you named. Nothing on the pages that survive is touched.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Plenty of free tools do this by redrawing every page as a picture, which quietly destroys the text layer: the words can never be searched, selected or copied again, and no tool can put them back. Here the pages are copied whole, so text stays text, links still work, and the file stays the size it should be.

How this tool works

The pages you keep are copied as whole objects into a new document, in their original order. The ones you delete are simply not copied.

Nothing is redrawn, so text stays selectable, links keep working and drawings stay sharp. Your original file is untouched: this writes a new document and hands it to your browser.

It will not let you delete every page, because a PDF with no pages in it is not a file any reader will open.

The pages people usually want gone

• A blank page from the scanner. Double-sided scanning of a single-sided document leaves an empty page between every real one.
• The fax cover sheet, or the compliments slip. Fine at the time, not something to keep in the file for seven years.
• Terms and conditions you have already got. Twelve pages of boilerplate on the back of a two page quote.
• Somebody else's section. A bundle came back with four trades in it and you only need yours.
• The page with the wrong figure on it, replaced by a corrected one you merge back in afterwards.

Writing the page numbers

Commas and dashes, the way you would say it out loud. "3" removes one page. "5-12" removes a run. "1, 5-12, 20-end" does all three at once.

It is deliberately forgiving, because this gets typed in a hurry. Spaces anywhere are fine. Semicolons work as well as commas. "12-5" is read as 5 to 12 rather than rejected. "end" and "last" both mean the final page. A number larger than the document is dropped quietly instead of throwing the whole list away, so one typo in a long list does not cost you the rest of it.

The panel underneath tells you how many pages will be left before you commit to anything, which is the check worth doing on a long document.

This is not redaction

Worth being clear about, because the two get confused and the difference matters when something is confidential.

Deleting a page removes that whole page from the document. If what you actually need is to remove a name, an address or a figure from a page you are keeping, that is redaction, and it is a different job with different rules. Drawing a black box over text in most editors leaves the text sitting underneath it, still selectable and still copyable by anybody who tries.

Keep the original

Good habit regardless, and it costs nothing here because your original is never modified. The tool reads it and writes a new file; the one on your machine is exactly as it was.

For anything that might one day be evidence, a signed contract, a certificate or a tender return, keep the full document and send the shortened one.

The page you are removing is the reason you came

No account, no email address, no size limit, no watermark and no queue. The document is opened, rewritten and saved by your own browser, and no request leaves the page while it happens.

Which is the whole shape of the job here. The page somebody is deleting is almost always the one they do not want seen: a rate, a name, an internal note left in a set going out. Uploading the file to remove it means sending that page to a stranger first, which is the opposite of what was wanted.