How do I extract a specific range of pages from a PDF?
After uploading your PDF, open the Settings panel and select "Custom range". Enter a comma-separated list of page numbers or ranges — for example "1-3, 5, 8-10" extracts pages 1 through 3, page 5, and pages 8 through 10 as separate PDF files. You can also use the visual thumbnail grid to click pages to include or exclude. Combining the range input with the visual selector gives you precise control over exactly which pages are extracted.
Will the extracted pages maintain the original PDF quality?
PurePDF extracts pages by rendering them to canvas and re-encoding as raster images, so the output preserves the visual appearance at your chosen resolution setting. The default 2× resolution produces clear, sharp pages suitable for most uses. Selecting a higher resolution setting preserves finer details. As with other PurePDF tools, the rasterization process means selectable text and vector data are converted to image layers in the output. For extractions that must preserve full PDF fidelity including text selection, use a desktop tool like PDFsam or Adobe Acrobat.
Can I split a large PDF into chapters or sections?
Yes, though PurePDF does not automatically detect chapter boundaries — you need to specify the page ranges manually. For example, if chapter 1 spans pages 1–15 and chapter 2 spans pages 16–30, you enter those ranges separately to produce two output PDFs. You can run multiple extraction operations on the same uploaded PDF without re-uploading: change the page range and click Split again. Each extraction runs independently and produces its own download.
What output format does the PDF splitter produce?
Each extracted page becomes an individual PDF file. When extracting multiple pages at once, PurePDF also creates a ZIP archive containing all the individual page PDFs, which you can download with a single click. The individual PDF files are named with the page number suffix for easy identification. The ZIP is assembled entirely in your browser using JSZip — no server interaction is required to create the archive.
Is there a limit to how many pages I can split from a PDF?
There is no enforced page count limit — you can split any PDF regardless of how many pages it contains. However, splitting a very large PDF (hundreds of pages) produces a large number of output files and may take considerable time and memory. The practical limit is your browser's available RAM: each page must be rendered to canvas in memory during splitting. For very large documents, splitting in ranges rather than splitting every page at once is more efficient.
Are my PDF files uploaded to a server during splitting?
No. PDF splitting runs entirely in your browser using PDF.js for page rendering and pdf-lib for output PDF assembly. No file data is transmitted to any server at any point. Your document — whether it contains confidential contracts, personal financial statements, or proprietary business reports — stays entirely on your device. PurePDF was designed from the ground up as a client-side tool specifically so sensitive documents never need to leave your computer.
Can I split a password-protected PDF?
No. Password-protected PDFs cannot be split with PurePDF until the password protection is removed. If you upload a protected PDF, PDF.js will attempt to prompt for the password, but the splitting workflow will not proceed with an encrypted file. To split a protected PDF, first remove the password using PurePDF's Encrypt PDF tool or another PDF utility, then upload the unlocked version for splitting. You can re-encrypt the resulting split pages if needed using the Encrypt PDF tool.
Does the PDF splitter work with scanned PDFs?
Yes. Scanned PDFs are just PDFs with embedded raster images as page content, and they work identically to text-based PDFs in PurePDF. Each page is rendered through PDF.js, which handles embedded scan images correctly, and saved as an individual PDF. The visual quality of scanned pages in the output is determined by your resolution setting — higher settings preserve the detail of the original scan more faithfully. Any OCR text layer present in the source PDF will not be preserved in the split output pages.
How does the PDF splitter differ from the PDF Delete Pages tool?
The PDF Splitter is designed for extracting pages — you select which pages you want, and each page (or range) becomes a separate output PDF file. The PDF Delete Pages tool is designed for removing pages — you mark the pages you want to remove, and the remaining pages are saved as a single cleaned PDF. Use the Splitter when you need to divide a document into parts; use Delete Pages when you want to remove specific pages and keep everything else together in one file.
Can I use the PDF splitter to separate a two-sided scan into single pages?
Yes. If you scanned a document two pages at a time (two physical pages per scan), the PDF will have fewer pages than the original document, with each PDF page containing two physical pages side by side. PurePDF extracts individual PDF pages as they are — it does not detect or split within a single page image. To separate a two-up scan into individual pages, you would first need to crop and split each page image using an image editor, then convert those images to individual PDFs. PurePDF's JPG/PNG to PDF converter can handle the final assembly step.