How to Split a PDF
Splitting a PDF means keeping the pages you want and discarding the rest. Here is how to do it online in under a minute, how to do it without uploading anything, and how to write page ranges so you get exactly what you expect.
The quick answer
Upload the PDF, type the pages you want to keep, and download a new document containing just those pages. Your original file is never modified.
- Open the split PDF tool.
- Upload your PDF.
- Type the pages you want — for example 1-3, 5 keeps pages one, two, three and five.
- Click Extract pages and download the result.
How to write a page range
Almost every PDF tool uses the same notation, and getting it wrong is the usual reason people end up with the wrong pages. Numbers refer to the position of the page in the file, counting from 1 — not to any page number printed on the page itself.
- A single number selects one page: 4
- A hyphen selects a run: 2-6 selects five pages
- Commas combine them: 1-3, 7, 10-12
- Order is preserved, so 5, 1 puts page five first
Printed page numbers are a trap
A report with a cover page and a contents page often prints "1" on what is physically the third page of the file. Ask for page 1 and you get the cover, not the page marked 1.
Scroll to the page you actually want and read the position your PDF reader shows — usually something like "3 of 40" in the toolbar. That first number is what a split tool expects.
Splitting into several separate files
Most online tools, Filembly included, produce one PDF containing your selection rather than a ZIP of individual files. To end up with several documents, run the tool once per group: extract 1-5 and download, then extract 6-10 and download.
If you need every page as its own file and the document is long, a desktop tool such as PDFsam is better suited — it can burst a document into single pages in one operation.
Splitting without uploading: Mac
Open the PDF in Preview, show View then Thumbnails, then select the pages you want while holding Command. Drag the selection out to your desktop and macOS creates a new PDF from just those pages. Nothing leaves your computer, which matters for confidential documents.
Splitting without uploading: Windows
Open the PDF in any reader, press Ctrl+P to print, and choose Microsoft Print to PDF as the printer. Enter the page range you want in the Pages field and print to a new file.
This works everywhere, but it re-renders the pages rather than copying them, so text can lose sharpness and file size often grows. Prefer a real split tool when quality matters.
Why the extracted file is not much smaller
Pulling three pages out of a hundred-page document does not always produce a file three percent of the size. Fonts, colour profiles and other shared resources travel with any page that uses them, so a short extract from a font-heavy document can stay surprisingly large. The saving is real but rarely proportional to the page count.