How to split a PDF or extract pages

Pull a single page or a range of pages out of a PDF and save them as a new document — privately, in your browser.

Sometimes you only need part of a PDF: one signed page from a long contract, a few pages of a manual, or a chapter from a large report. Instead of printing and rescanning, you can extract exactly the pages you want into a fresh PDF. Toolsfully does this locally, so the original document never leaves your device.

Step-by-step

1. Open the Split tool. Go to the PDF Tools section and select the "Split / Extract" tab.
2. Add your PDF. Drag one PDF onto the drop area or click to browse. The tool works on a single document at a time.
3. Enter the pages you want. In the "Pages to extract" box, type the pages or ranges. For example, 1-3, 5, 8-10 keeps pages 1 through 3, page 5, and pages 8 through 10.
4. Extract and download. Click "Extract & download." Toolsfully builds a new extracted.pdf containing only those pages and saves it to your device.

How to write page ranges

• A single page: 7
• A continuous range: 4-9
• A mix: 1, 3, 5-8, 12

The extracted pages keep the order of the original document. Duplicate entries are removed automatically.

The parts can add up to more than the whole

Splitting a document rarely divides its size neatly, and it can easily increase it. The reason is that a PDF shares resources across pages: an embedded font is stored once and referenced by every page that uses it, and the same is true of a logo appearing in a header. Split ten pages into ten files and each one needs its own copy of every font and image it touches.

For a text document with two embedded fonts, that overhead can be several hundred kilobytes per file — irrelevant on a large document, dominant on a short one. If you split a 4 MB report into twenty sections and the total comes to 9 MB, nothing has gone wrong; you have simply made twenty copies of the shared material.

What crosses the cut

Anything that spanned the boundary you split on does not survive it. Internal links pointing at a page now in another file have nowhere to go. The bookmark outline is divided, so each part keeps only the entries for pages it contains, and the top-level structure that made sense of them is gone. A form whose fields were spread across pages is separated into parts that no longer share a form.

None of this is avoidable — a reference to a page in a different document is not a thing a PDF can express — but it is worth choosing split points with it in mind. Cutting at the boundaries the document already has, between chapters or sections, breaks far less than cutting at an arbitrary page number, because those are the places where fewest things were reaching across.

Frequently asked questions

Can I split one PDF into many separate files?

This tool extracts your chosen pages into one new PDF. To create several separate files, run the extraction once per page range you need.

Does the original file change?

No. Your original PDF is untouched — the tool creates a brand-new file with just the pages you selected.

Are my files uploaded?

No. Extraction happens entirely in your browser, so nothing is sent to a server.