Click or drag your PDF to visually select exactly which pages you need. Your document never leaves your browser.
Or click anywhere in this box to browse your files.
This tool renders and splits your documents entirely within your local web browser. Your private PDFs, legal documents, and sensitive data are never uploaded, stored, or sent to external servers. The entire process happens in your browser's memory and is discarded when you close the tab.
Everything office workers, legal professionals, and students need to know about extracting pages safely.
When you upload a PDF to a typical online tool, your document travels over the internet to a third-party server, is processed on hardware you have no visibility into, and is typically stored on disk for hours, days, or even weeks. For most free services, this storage is a core part of their business model - the contents of your file may be indexed, analyzed by machine learning systems, or retained for a period defined only in their fine print.
For lawyers, accountants, human resources professionals, and students, this creates serious risk. A contract, a tax return, a medical record, or a thesis draft contains personally identifiable information (PII) that could be exposed by a data breach at the third-party company. Many corporate security policies explicitly prohibit uploading internal documents to unvetted cloud services for this exact reason. Using a browser-based tool that performs all processing locally eliminates this risk at its root: no upload means no exposure, no breach risk, and no data retention questions to worry about.
Modern browsers are remarkably powerful computing environments. When you load a PDF file into this tool, JavaScript reads the file's raw binary data into an in-memory ArrayBuffer - a temporary data structure that exists only for the duration of your browser session. Two specialized libraries then take over.
First, Mozilla's pdf.js - the same rendering engine that powers the PDF viewer built into Firefox - decodes each page of the document and uses the HTML5 Canvas API to paint a visual preview. The Canvas API is a browser-native feature that lets code draw pixel-by-pixel images directly onto your screen without any server involvement. Second, when you click "Extract," the pdf-lib library reads the same ArrayBuffer, identifies the internal byte offsets that correspond to your chosen page indexes, and writes a brand new PDFDocument object containing only those pages. The final output is converted to a Blob - a binary object stored in memory - and a temporary download link is created pointing to it. When you click download, the file is saved directly from memory to your hard drive. At no point does any of this data leave your machine.
No - and this is one of the most important technical distinctions between a browser-based tool like this one and a screenshot-based or print-to-PDF approach. When pdf-lib copies pages from your original document into the new file, it is copying the raw page description data byte-for-byte. It does not convert the page to an image, re-compress any embedded photographs, re-rasterize any vector graphics, or re-encode any embedded fonts.
The result is a mathematically identical copy of those specific pages at their original resolution, with all embedded fonts preserved, all vector artwork intact, and all image data at its original compression level. A 300 DPI scanned legal document extracted with this tool will remain at exactly 300 DPI. A beautifully typeset report with embedded custom fonts will retain every glyph perfectly. This is the same fidelity you would get from professional desktop software like Adobe Acrobat, and it is exactly what makes this approach suitable for professional and legal use.
This depends on the type of password protection applied to the document. PDFs support two distinct levels of encryption: an "open password" (also called a user password) that prevents the file from being opened at all, and a "permissions password" (also called an owner password) that restricts actions like printing, copying, or editing while still allowing the document to be opened.
If your PDF requires you to enter a password simply to open it, this tool will not be able to process it - the raw bytes are encrypted and neither pdf.js nor pdf-lib can interpret them without the decryption key. However, if your PDF opens freely in any viewer but shows a notice that editing or copying is restricted, those restrictions are enforced by honor system in most software, and browser-based libraries such as pdf-lib are typically able to read and copy the page content without issue. The safest approach is to try loading your document - if the thumbnail grid renders successfully, your pages can be extracted.
This tool is specifically designed for exactly this use case and offers two complementary methods. The first is the visual thumbnail grid: scroll through the rendered previews of every page, click each one you want to include, and the selection input updates automatically to reflect your choices. This is ideal for documents where you need to browse before deciding, such as a 60-page report from which you want to pull the executive summary, a specific data table, and the appendix.
The second method is direct text entry in the "Selected Pages" input field. If you already know exactly which pages you need - for example, pages 1, 5, 12 through 18, and 24 - you can type this directly as "1, 5, 12-18, 24" without needing to scroll the grid at all. This method is particularly efficient for large documents of 100 pages or more, where scrolling through every thumbnail would be time-consuming. Both methods are synchronized in real time: selecting thumbnails updates the text box, and typing a range highlights the corresponding thumbnails. You can freely mix both approaches for maximum efficiency.