March 22, 2026
A colleague sends you a 120-page annual report. You only need the financial summary on pages 45-52. You obviously cannot forward the entire 120-page document to a client -- it might contain information that should not be shared externally. What you need is just those eight pages, pulled out into their own file.
When Would You Need to Extract Pages?
More often than you might think:
- Pulling a specific chapter from a long report to share with a colleague or client
- Extracting this week's assigned reading from a textbook PDF
- Isolating the signature page of a contract for separate filing
- Removing the cover page and table of contents, keeping just the body
- Selecting questions from a test bank to create a quiz
- Breaking a large document into smaller parts for batch sending
How to Extract Pages
With PDF Under's split tool, the process is simple:
- Upload your PDF
- Enter the pages you want in the page range field. The format is flexible:
- Continuous range: "3-7" gives you pages 3 through 7
- Single page: "12" gives you just page 12
- Mix and match: "1-3, 5, 8-10" gives you pages 1-3, page 5, and pages 8-10
- Click split and download the new PDF containing only your selected pages
The whole thing takes under ten seconds. And your original PDF is completely unaffected -- the split tool creates a brand-new file with the pages you chose.
Which Page Numbers to Use
This trips people up more than anything else, so it is worth spelling out clearly.
The split tool uses the PDF file's own page numbering -- that is, the page numbers you see at the bottom of your PDF reader (Adobe Reader, Preview, Chrome's built-in viewer, etc.).
These might not match the page numbers printed on the document itself. A book PDF, for example, might have three pages of front matter (cover, copyright, table of contents) before the body begins. If the book's printed "page 1" is actually the fourth page of the PDF, and you want pages 1-5 of the book content, you would type "4-8" in the tool.
If you are unsure, just scroll to the page you want in your PDF viewer and note the page number shown at the bottom.
What If the Extracted Pages Are Still Too Large?
Sometimes, even a handful of pages adds up to a significant file size. This is common with scanned PDFs, where each page is a high-resolution image. Five pages from a scanned document might still be 20MB.
Easy fix: after extracting, run the result through the compress tool to bring it down to your target size. Split first, then compress. Two steps, done.
Split and Merge Are Complementary
Splitting and merging are two sides of the same coin. Split takes pages out of a big PDF; merge combines small PDFs into one.
You can even use them together: extract pages 1-5 from document A, extract pages 10-15 from document B, then merge those two extractions into a single new file. This is especially useful when assembling meeting materials or curating content from multiple sources.
Practical Tips
- Preview before splitting: confirm your page range in your PDF reader so you do not grab the wrong pages
- Non-continuous ranges are fine: separate multiple ranges with commas
- Your original file is safe: the tool generates a new file and never modifies the input
- For large documents you want to divide evenly (say, every 10 pages), just run the split tool multiple times with different ranges