Delete pages from a PDF

Delete pages from PDF files in the browser: drop the file above, remove the pages you do not need from the thumbnail sidebar, and click Download to get a shorter PDF. The file stays on your device the whole time.

How to delete pages from PDF files

1. Open the PDF here or on the home page with Open a PDF.
2. In the thumbnail sidebar, find the page you want gone. The main view scrolls to it when you click the thumbnail, so you can confirm it is the right one.
3. Use the thumbnail's delete control. The page disappears from the sidebar and the page count drops by one.
4. Remove any other pages the same way. If you delete the wrong one, Ctrl+Z brings it back.
5. Click Download. The new file contains only the pages that are still in the sidebar.

Deleting is also the viewer's answer to "extract pages": delete everything except the range you want, download, and you have a PDF of just those pages. The long form with examples is in how to delete pages from a PDF.

What happens to the file

The pages are not hidden; they are left out when pdf-lib writes the new document. Acrobat, Preview or a phone reader will show the shorter page count and nothing of the removed pages remains in the file, which matters when you are removing a page you do not want the recipient to see.

Keep in mind that this is different from the whiteout box. A whiteout covers part of a page visually while the text stays underneath; deleting the whole page removes it. If a page holds sensitive content you want gone, deleting the page is the certain option.

Removed pages also take their share of the file size with them. A 40-page scan trimmed to 5 pages gets correspondingly smaller, which is sometimes enough to get under an email attachment limit without a separate compress step.

Limits

• One page at a time. There is no "delete pages 10-45" field. For a long range it is faster to delete in the sidebar than you would expect, but a split tool is more comfortable for hundreds of pages; see split PDF.
• No undo for page operations. Undo (Ctrl+Z) covers annotations only; deleting, rotating and reordering pages rebuild the document. If you remove the wrong page, open the original file again. The original on disk is never changed.
• Password to open. Encrypted PDFs that ask for a password cannot be loaded. Remove the password first, as described in remove password from PDF.
• Form fields. Fillable forms are displayed but not editable as fields; deleting a page from a form works, but the remaining fields are not something the viewer edits.

Delete PDF pages in other tools

For a one-off edit of a contract, tax form or scan, the browser viewer is the fastest path that keeps the file private. For batch work across a folder, qpdf or PDFsam is the better fit.

Removing blank pages from a scan

The most common reason to delete pages is a scanner that saved the empty back side of every sheet. The thumbnail sidebar makes these easy to spot: blank pages show up as white rectangles between the pages with content, usually every second one.

1. Scroll the sidebar and look for the empty thumbnails. Zooming the main view is not necessary; a blank page is obvious at thumbnail size.
2. Delete each blank page from its thumbnail. Watch the page count in the viewer drop as you go.
3. Nearly blank pages, such as a sheet with only a page number or a faint stamp, look blank in the thumbnail. Click one to check in the main view before removing it.
4. If the scan is sideways as well, rotate the remaining pages before downloading; see rotate PDF.
5. Click Download. For a searchable result, run OCR first so the text layer is included in the same file.

A 60-sheet duplex scan with 30 blank backs becomes a 30-page file about half the size, which is often the real goal. Why scans produce these pages, and why they are images rather than text, is explained on what is a scanned PDF.

Frequently asked questions