Delete PDF Pages

Deleting by sight, not by number

Most of the time you do not know the numbers of the pages you want gone — you know what they look like. The blank backs of single-sided originals that went through a duplex scanner. The fax cover sheet. The page that was scanned twice. The terms and conditions nobody asked for. Each page is shown as a thumbnail, rendered from the document itself, so you pick them out by eye and mark them for deletion.

Marking is reversible until you save: a deleted page stays visible, dimmed, with a button to restore it. The count of pages kept updates as you go, so a 40-page file that should end up as 37 is easy to check.

Is a deleted page really gone?

Yes, and it is worth knowing why that is not always true elsewhere. Some editors “delete” a page by hiding it, or leave it in the file and drop it from the page list, which can leave its content recoverable. Here the saved PDF is a new document built only from the pages you kept. The deleted pages are never copied into it, and neither are images or fonts that only they used — which is also why the file often gets smaller.

That makes deleting a page a reliable way to keep a whole page from someone. It is not a way to hide part of one: covering a paragraph with a black box leaves the text underneath intact. To remove part of a page, use Redact PDF.

Common clean-ups

Blank pages from scanning are the usual reason. A sheet that is blank to you may not be blank to a scanner — it can carry a faint image of the other side or a grey cast — so look at the thumbnails rather than trusting automatic blank-page removal, which is exactly where real content gets thrown away.

Removing pages before sending is the other big one: the internal approval page before a proposal goes to the client, the pages of a bank statement that cover other accounts, the price sheet that should not go to a competitor. Delete them, save, and check the result in the preview before attaching it.

If what you actually want is a few pages out of a long document, it can be quicker to say which to keep than which to delete — Extract PDF Pages takes a range like 12-15 and saves just those.

On a phone, and with long scans

The page grid works on a phone screen: thumbnails sit two to a row, and each has its own delete and move buttons, so cleaning up a scan made with a phone camera does not need a computer. The PDF is processed on the phone itself, which also means a very large file is limited by the phone's memory rather than by an upload quota.

There is deliberately no one-click “delete every even page” button. Duplex scans of single-sided originals do produce a blank after every real page, but the one time a back page carries a handwritten note or a signature, an automatic rule throws it away. Marking pages by eye takes a few seconds longer and keeps that from happening.

If the PDF is password-protected, remove the password first with Unlock PDF; a document that cannot be opened cannot have its pages shown.

What the new file keeps and loses

The pages you keep are copied as they are: text stays selectable and searchable, images are not recompressed, and nothing is re-rendered, so there is no loss of quality of any kind.

Some things that belong to the document rather than its pages do not come across: bookmarks, the interactivity of form fields, digital signatures and the original's document properties. A signature in particular cannot survive, because it certifies the original file and this is a different one. Links that pointed to deleted pages will have nowhere to go.

Very long documents take a while to show, because every thumbnail is a real render of the page; a few hundred pages is fine on a modern computer, just not instant.