Every page is a thumbnail with a checkbox. Tick the ones you need, press Extract selected, and you get a new document holding exactly those pages — done on your own machine, with nothing uploaded.
Open the PDF and the pages appear as thumbnails down the side. Each thumbnail carries a checkbox. Tick page 3, tick page 7, tick pages 11 to 14, and the button at the top reads Extract selected (6) so you can see what you are about to take before you take it. Press it and the app builds one new document out of those six pages, in the order they had in the original.
That is the whole interaction. There is no range box to type 1-5 into and no syntax to get wrong, which matters more than it sounds: the commonest way to split the wrong pages out of a document is to miscount them in a text field. Here you are looking at the pages while you pick them.
The document you opened is not changed by extracting. The pages are copied into the new file and the original is still sitting there, intact, ready for the next selection.
Worth being straight about, because a lot of splitters advertise otherwise: an extraction produces one document, not a folder of them. If a 40-page report needs to become four 10-page files, you do it four times — tick the first ten and extract, tick the next ten and extract, and so on. Each pass takes a few seconds and the original never moves.
So there is no “split at every page” button, no split-by-page-count, and no splitting on bookmarks. If you are after a script that shreds a thousand-page file into a thousand files unattended, this is the wrong tool and we would rather say so on the page than after the download. For the ordinary job — pull the appendix out, send one chapter, keep the signed pages and bin the rest — ticking boxes is quicker than describing a range anyway.
Splitting from the other direction is often what people actually want. Select the pages you do not want and delete them, and they come out of the open document rather than into a new one. It is the same set of checkboxes. The one thing it will not do is empty the file: a PDF needs at least one page, so the delete button is disabled once a single page is left and the operation refuses to remove it.
Merge works the opposite way, combining several documents into one. One honest caveat there: merging drops the documents' bookmarks, so a merged file comes out without the outline the originals had. The page content, text and images are unaffected.
Once the pages are the ones you want, you can also reorder, rotate and crop the pages of the document, or redact text so it is removed from the file rather than covered with a box, before you send the split-out part on.
There is no cap anywhere in the code — not on how many pages a document has, not on how many you tick, not on how big the file is. Nothing here counts your documents or asks you to come back tomorrow. The only ceiling is the machine you are running it on, and a 600-page scan is not a problem for a laptop.
Splitting is free in all three ways of running it: the desktop app for macOS and Windows, the web app in a browser tab, and the Chrome extension. No account, no sign-in. The only two things anyone pays for in this product are the watermark tool and OCR.
Most answers to “split a PDF” are websites that ask for the file first. Think about the order of operations: to get five pages out of a contract, you hand the entire contract — all forty pages of it, including the thirty-five you were trying not to send — to a server you know nothing about. The split happens after the disclosure, which is precisely backwards.
Nothing here is uploaded, because there is nowhere for it to go. The web app does the work in the page itself. The Chrome extension declares no permissions and no host permissions at all, so the browser will not let it reach a server even if something inside it tried. The source is public and the extension's manifest is short enough to read in a minute.
Tick the pages, press extract, save the file. Nothing to install and nothing to sign up for.
No. There is no page limit and no file-size limit anywhere in the code — not on the length of the document, not on how many pages you tick, not on how many times you do it. The only ceiling is the machine you are running it on.
They are dropped. Merging several documents into one produces a file without the outline the originals had. Page content, text and images come through unchanged, but if the bookmarks matter, keep the originals.
Extracting does not. The pages you tick are copied into a new document and the file you opened is left as it was, so you can go back and take a different selection. Deleting pages is the other operation, and that one does remove them from the document you have open — it will not remove the last remaining page, because a PDF has to have at least one.