What does splitting a PDF do?
Splitting takes the pages you name and copies them into new documents. Each output file is a complete, valid PDF with its own page tree, and the original is left untouched — which is why the operation is safe to repeat with different ranges, and why a single page can appear in two output files without being duplicated in any meaningful sense. Text, vector art, embedded images, links and form fields all travel with the pages they belong to.
Three modes cover almost every real requirement. One file per page is what a scanner's output usually wants, so each page can be named and filed individually. A fixed number of pages per file is what a long report or a book wants, so each chapter travels as one document. Named ranges are for the arbitrary cut — invoices pulled out of a statement, an appendix detached from a paper — and they are also the only mode where you decide the order of the output.
The one thing to expect is that splitting does not always reduce the total size. Resources a page shares with its neighbours, such as a font used throughout or a logo repeated on every page, are copied into each output file rather than referenced between them. Ten single-page files can therefore together be larger than the document they came from, even though each one is smaller.
How to split a PDF
- Choose the PDF, up to 100 MB. The page count is reported as soon as it opens.
- Choose the mode: every N pages, specific ranges, or one file per page.
- For a fixed chunk, set the page count per file — 1 for single pages, 10 for ten at a time.
- For named ranges, write them comma-separated as 1-3, 4-6, 10. Each range becomes its own file in the order you write it.
- Press Split the PDF and check the list: each row shows the file name, the pages it contains and its size.
- Download a single file, or take the whole set as a ZIP when there are several.
Split PDF limits and rules
| Item | Limit |
|---|---|
| Input | One PDF, up to 100 MB |
| Modes | Fixed pages per file, named ranges, or one file per page |
| Ranges | 1-3, 7, 12 — commas between them, ascending or not, each becoming a file |
| Output | A single file when there is one, otherwise a ZIP of every piece |
| Order | Ranges keep the order you write them; other modes go forward through the document |
| Encrypted files | Not supported — remove the password first |
| Page content | Preserved exactly: text stays selectable, images are not re-encoded |
| Not offered | Deleting pages, reordering them or merging several PDFs — those are separate operations |
When to use it
- Separating a scanned stack into one file per document so each can be named and filed.
- Extracting a single chapter, appendix or signature page to send on its own.
- Pulling the invoice pages out of a monthly statement by listing the pages that carry them.
- Splitting a large report into per-section files that are easier to email or annotate.
- Breaking a combined form into its individual pages before filling them in and returning them.
Is it private?
The PDF is read, split and rebuilt inside your browser. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is retained on a server, so a document containing personal or financial detail — a statement, a contract, a medical record — never leaves your machine. Closing the tab discards the source and every output file.
Frequently asked questions
Because shared resources are copied per output file rather than referenced between them. A font embedded once in a hundred-page document is embedded again in each of a hundred single-page files, and the same applies to images used on every page. For a long document with a font or a logo throughout, the parts together can exceed the whole. It is not a defect and not something a different tool avoids — it is how the format stores resources.
Links and form fields travel with the pages that hold them, so an internal link to a page that ended up in a different output file becomes a link to nothing, and a field on page 3 of a form is intact in the piece that contains page 3. Document-level bookmark trees are not reproduced, because they describe the whole document and there is no longer a whole document to describe. Text stays selectable and searchable in every piece.
Use the specific-ranges mode and type a single number, or set every N pages to 1 and delete the files you do not want after the split — the first is faster. Either way you get a one-page PDF that is a valid document in its own right, not a fragment. If you then need it in a different order or combined with something else, that is a merge operation on the results rather than another split.
Not while it is encrypted. A password-protected file is a stream that cannot be parsed without the key, and this tool deliberately asks for no password and stores nothing, so it reports the file as unreadable instead of failing obscurely. Remove the protection with whatever set it — the original application, or the reader's own save-a-copy option if you have the password — and then split. Nothing about the split depends on the protection itself.
In practice, nothing — the terminology overlaps and both describe the same operation, which is to write a subset of pages into a new document. Some tools reserve extract for the case where you also delete those pages from the original in the same step, which is really two operations: split, then remove. This tool does the first only, and never modifies your source file, which is the safer default when the original is the only copy you have.
No hard limit imposed here; the practical ceiling is memory, since every piece is held in the page until you download it. A thousand-page document split into a thousand files is a large amount of memory for a browser tab and could become slow, so for that scale it is worth splitting in fixed chunks of a hundred pages at a time and taking a ZIP per run. The file size cap of 100 MB keeps the input side predictable.
Related tools
Written and maintained by Md. Nur Hossain Repon.