Split PDF

Why none of this leaves your device

Think about what people actually turn into PDFs. Passports and visas. Bank statements for a loan application. Degree certificates. Rental agreements with a signature on them. Medical letters. Almost every one of those is a document you would not hand to a stranger.

An online converter that works the ordinary way asks you to do exactly that. Your file goes to a server you know nothing about, in a country you were not told, and is processed and stored for some period described in a policy nobody reads. Most of those services are honest. You have no way of checking which ones.

This page removes the question. The conversion runs in your browser, using the image decoder your browser already has and a PDF writer that is part of the page. No file is transmitted, so there is nothing on our side to store, scan, sell or lose. You can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and it will still work, which is the simplest proof there is.

One thing to be straight about: copying pages between documents uses pdf-lib, an open source library published under the MIT licence. It is not our code. We serve our own copy of it from this domain rather than loading it from a content network, so opening this page tells nobody else that you did, and it runs entirely in your browser. The file still goes nowhere.

Choosing the pages

Every page is drawn as a thumbnail the moment the file is read, so you choose by looking rather than by counting. Click a page to keep it, click it again to drop it, and the count underneath says how many you have.

Order is respected. Click page five, then one, then three, choose One PDF with the pages I choose, and you get a document whose pages are five, one and three in that order, which is a quick way to reorder a document as well as to trim one. Choosing a separate PDF for every page ignores the marks and gives you the lot.

What people split a PDF for

• Sending one page of a statement without sending the other eleven.
• Removing the pages nobody needs before an upload with a size limit.
• Separating a scanned batch where several documents were fed through in one go.
• Pulling out a form or a single certificate from a bundle.

If something does not look right

It says the PDF is password protected

Then it is. A locked document cannot be opened without its password by anything, here or elsewhere. Open it in a reader, enter the password, save an unprotected copy, and use that.

The form fields have gone

An interactive form belongs to the document rather than to a page, so it cannot survive being combined with another document that has its own. If the answers matter, flatten the form first: print it to PDF from your reader, which turns the filled values into ordinary page content.

The pages are in the wrong order

Files are listed in the order the browser handed them over, which for a multiple selection is not always the order you clicked. Every row is numbered and has arrows, so set the order before you press the button rather than after.

The file is as big as everything added together

Because it is. Merging copies pages; it does not compress them. Nothing here makes a PDF smaller, and any tool that claims to while keeping the text is either removing something or not doing what it says.

Nothing happened when I pressed the button

Merging needs at least two readable documents, and splitting needs one. If a row is marked in the list as unreadable it is not counted. A very large document can also take a few seconds before anything appears.

A signed document now says the signature is invalid

That is correct and unavoidable. A digital signature certifies one exact file, and a merged file is a different one. Sign after merging, never before.

Free, with no account and no watermark

No sign-up, no daily limit, no watermark and no page cap. There is no paid tier holding anything back, because the work happens on your computer rather than on a server we have to pay for.

The files keep sensible names. Splitting gives you your own filename with the page number added and zero padded; merging gives you one file called merged.pdf. Nothing is added to the document itself.

If you need the result smaller, compress the images before they become a PDF, or split out the pages you actually need. Our other PDF tools cover turning images into a document and taking a document back to images, all in the same way: on your machine, with nothing uploaded.