PDF Page Tools

[ THE DOCUMENT ]

Choose a PDF to work on its pages.

[ WHAT THIS IS ]

A page selection has four ways of going silently wrong, and none of them throws an error.

A range past the end. A range typed backwards. A repeated page. A list that does not ascend. Each produces a document that looks right and is missing something.

So each one is a decision written down. 1-9999 on a twelve-page document is “all of it”, not a mistake. 5-2 is read as pages 2 to 5 and says so. 1,1,2 is kept, because extracting a page twice is a real request.

And 3,1,2 reorders the document — because the order you type is the order that comes out.

What will be kept or removed is printed above before you download anything. The mistake is visible before the document is written rather than after it is opened.

[ QUESTIONS ]

Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?

No. It is read from your disk into this browser tab and the new document is built there. There is no upload and no server, which matters because the documents people trim are contracts, payslips, bank statements and scanned IDs.

How do I write the page numbers?

Single pages and ranges separated by commas: 1-3, 5, 8-10. Open ranges work too — 5- means page 5 to the end, and -4 means the start to page 4. Pages are numbered from 1, the way your reader shows them. The page prints back what it will actually keep or remove before you download anything.

What happens if I type a page that does not exist?

A range that runs past the end stops at the last page and says so; a page entirely beyond the end is dropped and named. Neither is an error, because 1-9999 on a twelve-page document means "all of it" and the person typing it knows what they meant. A selection that is entirely outside the document is refused, since that is a mistake rather than shorthand.

I typed 5-2 by accident. What does it do?

It reads it forwards as pages 2 to 5 and tells you it did. A backwards range is almost always a range typed in the wrong order; refusing it helps nobody and silently dropping it is worse. If you actually wanted the pages reversed, list them individually — 5, 4, 3, 2 — because the order you type is the order they come out.

Can I reorder pages with this?

Yes. The pages come out in the order you list them, so 3, 1, 2 rebuilds the document in that order. The page warns you when your list is not ascending, because most of the time that was a typo rather than an instruction.

Does turning a page rotate it permanently?

It sets the rotation the page carries, which is what every reader honours — the same thing your reader does when you rotate and save. It is applied on top of any rotation already there rather than replacing it, because a scanner writes 90 on every page of a landscape document, and setting rather than adding would leave those pages untouched while turning their neighbours.

Is the content re-rendered or compressed?

No. Pages are copied whole, with the fonts, images and colour profiles they reference. Nothing is decoded and redrawn, so the pages that come out are exactly the pages that went in — which is also why the file size does not drop much when you remove pages that shared resources with the ones you kept.

Why will it not open my password-protected PDF?

Because the page contents of an encrypted PDF cannot be read without the password. Opening it anyway produces a document that looks right and shows blank pages, and you would not discover that until somebody else opened it. Remove the password in the program that made the file first.

[ THE MATHS ]
On a 12-page document
1-3, 5, 8-101,2,3,5,8,9,10
10-999910,11,12 — clamped
5-22,3,4,5 — read forwards
5-5 to the end
3,1,2reorders
“Remove” is “keep” over the complement: remove 2 and 4 is keep 1, 3, 5. One code path builds the document — two paths that mean the same thing drift, and the one used less often is the one that breaks.
[ NEXT ]
89PDF MergeTo combine documents rather than trim one
91Images to PDFTo make a PDF out of pictures
88File ChecksumTo prove a document arrived intact
86Image Metadata RemoverThe same idea, for photographs
[ IMPORTANT ]

The file is read in your browser and nothing about it is transmitted or stored. Pages are copied whole and never re-rendered — but removing pages may not shrink the file much, because pages that remain can reference the same fonts and images. Nothing you type here is sent to our servers — the calculation runs entirely in your browser.