Delete PDF Pages

How do you delete specific PDF pages and check the result?

Choose your PDF, enter unwanted page numbers in Pages to delete, check the marked thumbnails, and click the button showing how many pages will be deleted. Click Download on the result screen to save the new PDF. Selecting pages alone does not remove them, and generating a result does not overwrite your original.

For a concrete example, start with a 12-page report and enter 2, 5-7. This marks pages 2, 5, 6, and 7: four deletions, leaving eight pages. The action reads Delete 4 pages (8 remaining). The output contains original pages 1, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 in that order. Original page 8 becomes the fourth page in the new document, although a page number printed inside its content stays unchanged.

Two ways to create the same eight-page result from the report

Mode	Range field	Pages removed	Pages retained
Pages to delete	2, 5-7	2, 5, 6, 7	1, 3, 4, 8-12
Keep only these pages	1, 3-4, 8-12	2, 5, 6, 7	1, 3, 4, 8-12

Which page range formats does the tool accept?

Use commas between separate entries and a hyphen for an inclusive range. 4- means page 4 through the final page, while -3 means the first three pages. Entries refer to the thumbnail positions, starting at 1, rather than Roman numerals or chapter labels printed on the sheets. Spaces are ignored within an entry, and repeated or overlapping ranges are combined without counting a page twice.

A reversed range, an out-of-range number, or nonnumeric text produces an error naming the offending entry. Invalid input does not replace the last valid selection, so correct the field before relying on the marked pages. Clicking thumbnails also synchronizes the field into a compact range format. With Keep only these pages checked, the label becomes Pages to keep; marked thumbnails still identify deletions.

How do you select pages efficiently and inspect them?

Click a thumbnail to toggle it. Shift-click adds the inclusive interval between the previous click and the current page to your existing selection. Odd and Even replace the selection with alternating page positions. Use them for scans only after checking which side is unwanted: an inserted cover sheet can change the pattern.

Press A outside input fields to select all pages, then press it again to clear a fully selected document. Undo and Redo navigate selection history; Ctrl/Cmd+Z undoes, and Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+Z redoes. The history retains up to 100 previous selection states. These controls adjust which pages are marked, rather than restoring an overwritten source file.

Preview size offers Tiny, Small, Medium, and Large thumbnails, with Small selected initially. Focus a thumbnail and press P for a larger preview. Its Prev and Next controls navigate pages; Delete this page or Keep this page toggles the current page. Close the preview and recheck the remaining count before exporting.

How does blank page detection work on scanned documents?

Click Select blank pages to scan the loaded document. Each page is rendered at a target width of 160 pixels. The detector estimates its background using the most common luminance value and requires at least 99.5% of pixels to fall within the selected tolerance. Normal is the default; Strict uses a luminance tolerance of 6, Normal 20, and Loose 40 on a 0–255 scale.

Found pages are added to existing selections. A scan with no matches reports that no blank pages were found. This measures visual uniformity, not the absence of PDF text objects or meaningful information. Faint signatures, small page numbers, and sparse notes need manual review. A uniformly shaded page may qualify too. Start with Strict when preserving faint marks matters, then inspect candidates before deletion.

When is deletion useful, and what happens to the retained content?

Remove an unwanted cover sheet, duplicate scan, blank separator, or appendix before sharing. Keep-only mode suits a short extract from a longer report. The engine loads the source with pdf-lib, creates a new document, copies only retained pages in their original order, and saves it. It does not render those pages into replacement images or provide an image-quality setting.

Deleting pages is not a compression setting, and there is no promised percentage reduction in file size. The result screen reports the output size so you can check it. Use Reorder PDF Pages if the retained pages need a different order, or Split PDF for a separate splitting workflow.

What happens to bookmarks, links, forms, and sensitive content?

The deletion operation copies pages into a fresh document; it does not include an explicit step to rebuild document outlines, retarget internal links, or recreate the document's form structure. Do not assume bookmarks, links to removed pages, or interactive forms will behave exactly as before. Open the saved result and test navigation and fields that matter to the recipient.

Page removal also differs from editing sensitive text within a retained page. This tool offers no search-and-redact operation or metadata-cleaning option. Review retained pages and document properties separately before sharing confidential material. For editing form content, see Fill and Sign PDF.

What limits and local processing details should you know?

At least one page must remain. Selecting every page disables deletion, as does selecting none; a single-page document therefore has no valid deletion selection. There is no explicit file-size cap in this upload flow, but the file is read into browser memory and previews consume additional resources. Large scans may be slow or fail. An unreadable PDF produces an error rather than a repaired document, and this workspace has no password-entry control.

PDF reading, blank-page scanning, and output generation run in your browser. The output is held as a PDF Blob for download. The site's Content Security Policy permits connections only to this site; that policy does not mean the page makes no network connections to load its own resources. Keep your source file, check the downloaded result, and use Back to editing to adjust the original selection if needed.