Splitting is the mirror image of merging - instead of combining files, you're breaking one PDF apart into pieces, either to extract a few specific pages or to divide a long document into smaller, more manageable sections.
Common reasons to split a PDF
- Pulling out just the pages you need from a much longer scanned document
- Breaking a large PDF (a textbook, a full report) into per-chapter or per-section files
- Separating a bundle of documents that were originally scanned together into individual files
- Getting a file under a page-count or size limit set by whoever you're submitting it to
How to split a PDF online, step by step
- Open the Split PDF tool.
- Upload the PDF you want to split.
- Choose the page ranges you want - either specific pages, or an even split into equal parts, depending on what you need.
- Download the resulting file (or files).
Splitting vs. deleting pages
If you only need to remove a couple of pages and keep everything else as one file, that's technically a form of splitting too - you're just keeping one of the resulting pieces and discarding the rest. The same tool handles both jobs; the difference is just which output you keep.
Once you have your split files, it's worth double-checking page numbers and any internal links or a table of contents still make sense in the new, shorter document before sending it on.