You have the scan of a stack of documents — a year's worth of payslips, a contract with all its attachments, a folder of receipts — that ended up in a single PDF because the multifunction scanner handed you back just one file. But now you need one precise part: pages 3-5 to send to your accountant, or that single signed form to mail to an office. Opening the whole thing in a heavy editor to pull out three pages is overkill, and rescanning page by page is wasted time.
It happens more often than you'd think, and it's not your fault: multifunction scanners and government portals tend to bundle everything into a single container, without asking you where one document ends and the next begins. The result is a long, unwieldy file when all you need is one piece — and sometimes it's even too heavy to attach to an email.
Extracting the right pages, without the file ever leaving your browser
To separate out what you need without installing anything, you can use Split PDF. You upload the document by dragging it in or clicking to select it, and everything stays on your computer: the tool works offline, and the pages are never sent to any server. As soon as the file is loaded you see its name, size and page count, and below it a grid appears with a numbered preview of every page. You know exactly what you're about to cut, instead of going from memory.
From there you choose how to split. For scattered pages or a range — the "pages 3-5" case from before — you select Split by range and write the ranges the way you'd read them, for example 1-3, 5, 8-10. As you type, the preview updates every page to show you which file it will end up in and, with a small scissors icon, where the cut falls: it's immediate visual feedback, you don't have to guess the result before you get it. If you write a range that doesn't exist in the document, the tool flags it right away instead of producing a broken file.
You don't always have to think in ranges. If you need every page as its own file — the case of a stack where every sheet is a different document — the Extract all pages mode separates them all in one go. And if the documents in the bundle all have the same length, for example two-page forms repeated over and over, Split every X pages cuts it into regular blocks without you having to write a single range.
Once the selection is right, press Split PDF. You can download everything as a ZIP archive, or — if you only care about one extract — check the option to merge the ranges into a single PDF and download that instead. You decide the name with the "Base filename" field, so you don't have to rename every piece by hand afterward.
Not just ranges: odd/even pages and scans that need cutting in half
Splitting by range covers most cases, but in two recurring situations the other modes save you a tedious manual job. The first is a double-sided scan done with a feeder that put all the fronts first and then all the backs: the Even / Odd Pages mode separates them into the two groups in one pass, without you having to rebuild the order by hand. The second is a booklet or two facing pages digitized onto a single sheet: Split Layout (Cut in half) splits every sheet into two separate pages, and you choose whether the cut is vertical (side-by-side pages) or horizontal (stacked one above the other). These are exactly the cases where doing it manually would mean repeating the same operation dozens of times.
When Split PDF isn't the right tool
There are a couple of cases where this tool isn't for you, and it's better to know that before you upload the file. If the PDF is password protected, the split won't start: a warning appears telling you to unlock it first, because the tool respects the original document's protection. In that case, go through Unlock PDF, remove the password, and come back to split it.
The other limit is about file size. Splitting a file doesn't make it lighter: if your problem is that the attachment is too heavy for email, cutting it into three doesn't reduce the weight of the images it contains — for that you need compression, not splitting. And if what you need to do is edit the content inside a page — not separate it — Split PDF isn't a text editor: it works on page indexes, it doesn't write inside them. If instead, after splitting, you realize you want to reorder or reassemble the pages into a different sequence, that's the job of Organize PDF, which picks up right where Split PDF leaves off.
The document you need, not the whole stack
Next time you're stuck with a single scan and only need one piece of it, don't open a full program: upload the file, check the previews, select the pages, and download. The document you need, separated from the rest, without ever losing track of which pages you're extracting.