How to split a PDF without Acrobat

Why people go looking

Splitting a PDF is a small job that the obvious tool charges for. Acrobat Reader, the free one, will not do it. Acrobat Pro will, at a monthly price that is hard to justify for something you need twice a year.

The operating system is not much help either. Preview on a Mac can do it if you know the drag-thumbnails-to-the-desktop trick. Windows has no built-in way at all. So most people end up on a converter website, which is fine right up until the document is something they would not email to a stranger.

Four steps

1. Open the split tool. Go to pdfsansar.com/split-pdf. It runs in the browser you already have, on any operating system.
2. Choose the file. Drop the PDF in, or click to pick it. Thumbnails of every page appear so you can see what you are choosing.
3. Say which pages you want. Type page numbers and ranges like 1-3, 7, 12-14, or click the pages themselves. You can also split the document into single pages.
4. Download the result. One result downloads as a PDF. Several arrive as a single zip, so you get one download rather than twenty.

Writing the page range

The range box takes the notation you would expect from a print dialog.

• 1-5 gives you the first five pages as one file.
• 1-3, 7, 12-14 gives you those pages, skipping everything else.
• A single number, like 9, pulls out one page on its own.
• If you would rather not count, click the page thumbnails instead and the range fills itself in.

Does splitting damage the pages?

No, and this is worth knowing because some tools do. The pages are copied into the new document exactly as they are, so text stays selectable, images keep their resolution, and nothing is re-compressed. A tool that rasterises pages while splitting would leave you with pictures of your document instead of the document.

The whole thing runs on your machine. Load the page, disconnect from the internet, and the split still works. That is the difference between this and a converter site.

If splitting is not quite what you need

Removing a few pages and keeping one file is a different job: delete and reorder pages does that. Going the other way, merge PDF puts documents back together.