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Maybe you need to take a page out to edit and then put it back in again? Or perhaps you have to take a couple of pages out and divide those into separate PDFs. Or, perhaps you just need to remove a page altogether. Ultimately, what you are looking for is how to separate pages from a PDF file.
In this article, we’ll be going through how to extract a PDF on Mac and Windows, as well as how to do it using our PDF.Live editor. This post will answer how to:
- Split a PDF into multiple PDF files
- Extract one or more pages from a PDF
- Divide large PDFs into smaller PDFs
- Save just one page or specific pages from a PDF
- Unmerge a PDF
- Break apart and cut pages from a PDF
- Separate a PDF into individual pages or chapters
- Export just one page from a PDF
- Pull pages from a PDF
- Take pages out of a PDF
Who knew there were so many ways to ask the same question? Whether you’re seeking to pull one page from a PDF file, extract and remove a page from a PDF, or separate one larger PDF into two or more smaller PDFs, the steps are basically the same.
First, Save Your PDF
Before we get started, you’ll want to make sure that you’ve saved the PDF onto your computer. If you’re viewing the PDF online through a web browser, you’ll need to save it to your computer before you can do anything. To do this, you can select Print in your browser settings. If you have a Chrome browser, you’ll likely see something similar to this:
On a Mac, the save as PDF might look like this:
Rather than choosing your printer as a destination, select Save as PDF instead. This will not send the PDF to your printer, but it will download the document to your computer as a PDF. Follow your computer’s prompts to name the PDF and where you’d like to save it. Once you do this, you can edit the PDF as it’s now on your computer.
Extract a PDF Page with PDF.Live
PDF.Live allows you to extract, separate, and edit pages of a PDF all in one app. You can import your PDF by dragging the file into PDF.Live’s editor.
- Insert, delete, and edit PDF pages
- On the left side of the PDF editor, you’ll notice a few options for editing pages: Split PDFs, Extract Pages, Rearrange Pages, and Insert Page. These 4 tools will be what we’ll be working with for extracting, splitting, and separating a page from a PDF.
- If you want to extract a page to permanently remove it from the PDF, follow those prompts.
- Extract PDF pages for other uses
- To extract a page from a PDF and save it in its own file, click Extract Pages on the Quick Tools bar on the left side of the screen. You’ll then be able to adjust all the pages of a PDF in one place. Click the … (three dots) next to the page you want to adjust to see the Page Manipulation settings. You can click Extract to download a single PDF with just the selected page. This will also remove the selected page from your PDF.
- To just remove the page entirely, click Delete.
- Merge documents
- If you’ve extracted pages from one PDF document and want to add them to a different one, It’s as simple as finding the extracted page(s) on your computer and inserting them into your new PDF. By default, they extract as “extracteddocument”. In your new PDF, click the … next to a page in your document and select Insert. Then, upload the extracted document to insert the page into your PDF. You can even specify the location you want the page to be. To merge multiple PDF files, use our PDF file merger.
- Rearrange pages
- To change the order of pages within your document, click Rearrange Pages in the quick toolbar. Where you see previews of the pages in your document, click and drag a page somewhere else in the list to alter the order it’s placed in. The changes will be reflected on the right-hand side of the PDF.Live editor where you can scroll down to view your PDF.
- Alternatively, click the … next to a page. Under Move Pages, select Move to Top or Move to Bottom if you want a page to be moved to the front or back of your PDF.
Separate PDFs on Mac
Apple devices come with the Preview App, which allows you to open and edit PDFs on your computer. With preview, you can add, delete, move and copy pages within Preview.
- Delete PDF pages on a Mac
- To delete a page, open Preview and go to View > Thumbnails to select the page or pages to delete and use the delete key on your keyboard. You can also go to Edit > Delete.
- Extract one page from a PDF on a Mac
- The easiest way to extract a single page from a PDF is to open Preview and from the thumbnail view, click and drag the page to your desktop.
- Move pages
- To move pages, go to View > Thumbnails or View > Contact Sheet, and then drag the pages to where you’d like them to go in the PDF
- Copy pages from one PDF to another
- Similarly to moving pages, go to View > Thumbnails or View > Contact Sheet and drag the thumbnail images from one PDF to the other.
Separate PDFs on Windows
Most Windows devices do not have a PDF editor included. However, when you’re using the above steps to obtain your PDF from a browser, you may have noticed that you can print specific pages of a PDF separately. If you see the destination called “Microsoft Print to PDF,” you can extract specific pages from a PDF.
You can also use PDF.Live, which requires no software to be downloaded and installed on your computer.
- Extract Pages from a PDF
- To extract pages from a PDF using Microsoft Print to PDF, first open the PDF you want to extract in a browser. You can drag the PDF to your browser to do this, or select Open With > “your browser of choice.”
- Then, select the pages you want to extract. You can write “3” if you want to extract page 3, “3-5” if you want to extract pages 3 through 5, or “3,5” if you just want to extract pages 3 and 5.
- Then, select print and those pages will save on your computer.