Split PDF

A page range is for pulling a known, specific set of pages out of a larger document — the signature block from a contract, a single chapter cited from a report, the two relevant pages from a fifty-page filing. It requires knowing which pages you want in advance, which makes it the right tool when you are working from something you have already read, rather than something you are trying to organise sight unseen.

Splitting into single pages is for the opposite situation: turning every page into its own file without needing to know anything about the content ahead of time, which is exactly what a batch of scanned documents bundled into one PDF usually needs before each one can be filed, renamed or processed separately. It is a mechanical, page-by-page operation rather than a selective one.

Splitting every N pages sits between the two — useful when a long document has a known, regular internal structure, such as a batch scan where every fixed number of pages is a separate form or receipt, and the chunks need to come out as separate files without extracting each one's exact range by hand.

A PDF stores fonts, embedded images and colour profiles as shared objects that pages reference rather than duplicate, so a 40-page document with three embedded fonts stores those fonts once, not forty times. Extracting a two-page range from that document still needs to carry the fonts (and any other resources) those two pages reference, and if the document uses those same shared resources throughout, the size of a small extract can end up surprisingly close to the size of the whole file — the byte count was never spread evenly across pages to begin with, so a fraction of the pages does not mean a proportional fraction of the size.

This is most noticeable on documents with heavy embedded fonts or large shared images, and closer to the naive expectation on documents built mostly from scanned page images, where each page genuinely does carry its own distinct data.

The original file is read into memory and used only as the source for building new documents from — it is never modified, moved or altered on your device, and because nothing is uploaded, there is also no copy of it sitting on a server anywhere afterwards. Splitting is a purely additive operation: you end up with new files alongside the original, never instead of it.

An encrypted PDF is rejected outright rather than having its protection silently stripped away in order to read it — the password needs to be removed in whatever application created or can open the file first, and the resulting unprotected document can then be split normally.