PDF tool
Split PDF
Take one PDF apart into separate documents. Choose the pages you want by range or by picking them one at a time, and each output file is written in this tab. Nothing is uploaded, there is no queue, and no account is needed. Pages are copied rather than redrawn, so the text in every result stays selectable and searchable.
1. Choose your PDF
Select one file. It is read in this tab and never sent anywhere.
Choose the PDF to split
You can also drag it onto this box
One PDF file
2. Choose how to split it
Choose your pages
Choose one PDF file to begin. Nothing is uploaded.
Files you saved
What this does not keep
Splitting a PDF means rebuilding it page by page, and a rebuilt PDF is not quite the file you started with. These parts are dropped, and it is worth knowing before you rely on a result:
- Form fields and their values. An input form comes out blank.
- Annotations, comments, highlights and notes. Nothing you or a collaborator had marked up survives.
- Bookmarks and the table of contents. The pages are there; the outline that pointed at them is not.
- Links inside the document. Internal jumps and embedded web links stop working.
- Digital signatures. Any signature is invalidated by the rebuild, which is expected.
- Document properties. Title, author and subject are not carried over to the new files.
What is kept is the visible page: text with its fonts, images, and vector drawings, all selectable and searchable. That is the part people actually split a PDF for.
Password-protected PDFs cannot be opened here. Remove the password first, then split the file. Nothing on this page can bypass encryption, and a locked file is refused rather than processed incorrectly.
Saving many files at once can also hit a browser limit. Chrome may ask permission for each download and Firefox may block some once you pass about ten. If files go missing, split fewer ranges per run.
Choosing how to split
Splitting produces one file per range, so the decision that matters is where the boundaries fall. Splitting by a fixed number of pages is fast and predictable; splitting at a chosen page is what you want when a document has natural sections such as chapters or separate forms.
Check the page numbers against what the document shows, not against what the PDF viewer counts. A PDF includes a cover and any blank pages, so printed page 1 is often file page 3, and a split made from printed numbers will be off by exactly that offset.
If you only need a few pages, extracting a range is cheaper than splitting everything and then deleting the parts you do not want. If you need every page separately, expect a number of files equal to the page count, which for a long document is a lot of files to handle.
Splitting does not compress. Each resulting file carries only its own pages, so the combined size of the outputs will be close to the original rather than smaller.
How this one works
Splitting a PDF is not a hard problem. Most of the difficulty is in the two ways it can go quietly wrong: producing output that looks right and is not, and losing something from the original without saying so.
Pages are copied, not photographed
Each page in your output is the original page object, carried across with its fonts, images and vector drawings intact. That is what keeps the text selectable and searchable in the result. The shortcut many tools take is to render each page to a picture and wrap those pictures in a new file. It looks identical on screen and the file is unreadable, unsearchable and much larger, which is the sort of failure that only surfaces when someone tries to quote from the document they just split.
Page numbers on screen are the page numbers you type
You type 1-3 and you get pages one, two and three. Internally the engine counts from zero, and that conversion happens in exactly one place, so there is no version of this where you enter 1 and receive the cover page by accident. A range can be written backwards, 5-2, and it will be understood as pages two to five rather than rejected.
Three ways to split, and they are genuinely different jobs
By ranges is the one people usually want: a long report becomes a file per chapter. Every page separately is for short documents and for forms where each page stands alone. Pages I pick collects scattered pages into a single new document, which is what you want when a handful of pages from different places belong together.
The limits are the same as every other splitter
Rebuilding a document drops what lives at the document level rather than the page level. Form fields arrive empty, annotations and comments are gone, the bookmark outline is not carried across, links inside the document stop working, signatures are invalidated and the properties panel comes back empty. This is not a shortcut taken here to save effort. It is a consequence of writing a new file out of page objects, and every tool that runs in a browser has exactly this ceiling. The list further up this page is the honest version.
It runs in this tab, which is why it is free of uploads
The whole job happens in the page you are already looking at, so there is no upload to wait for, no queue behind other people’s documents, no file-size ceiling worth mentioning, and nothing to delete afterwards. The trade is memory: a very large PDF is held in your browser’s memory while it is rebuilt, so on a low-memory phone a 500-page scan may struggle where a server with disk would not.
When to use something else
If the PDF is password protected, remove the password first; no browser tool can open an encrypted file. If it carries form data, signatures or comments that must survive, this is the wrong tool and a desktop application is the right one. If you need to reorder or rotate pages rather than divide them, the PDF editor does that in the browser; to join files instead, use Merge PDF. And if you want the pages as images rather than as a document, extract them instead of splitting them.
Further reading: Read the full guide: Split PDF
Common questions
Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?
No. The document is read, rebuilt and written back entirely inside this browser tab, on your machine. Nothing is sent to a server, which is also why there is no queue, no size ceiling and nothing to delete afterwards.
Does splitting a PDF reduce the quality?
No. Each page is copied across as a real page object with its fonts, images and drawings intact, so the visible page is identical and the text stays selectable and searchable. What is lost is everything that lives at document level rather than page level: form fields come out empty, annotations and comments are dropped, the bookmark outline and internal links do not survive, signatures are invalidated, and the document properties are not carried over. Any tool that rebuilds a PDF in a browser has the same limits.
Can I choose which pages go into each file?
Three ways. Enter ranges such as 1-3, 5, 8-10 and each range becomes its own file. Choose every page separately for one file per page. Or tick individual pages and save them together as a single document, which is what you want when scattered pages belong together.
Why will my password protected PDF not split?
The format keeps the contents encrypted, so the pages cannot be read without the password, and this tool has no way to ask for one. Open the file in a PDF reader, save an unprotected copy, and split that. Nothing here can bypass encryption.
Some of the files did not download. What happened?
Browsers limit how many downloads one page can trigger. Chrome may ask permission for each one, and Firefox tends to block the extras past about ten. Split fewer ranges per run and the rest will arrive.
How large a PDF can it handle?
Enough for ordinary documents, but not an archive. The open file is held in your browser memory while pages are rebuilt, and a tab will hit its ceiling without warning. A several-hundred-page scan may fail on a low-memory phone, where a machine with disk space would not. If it stalls, split in smaller pieces.