Saving and Extracting Specific Pages from a PDF Document

PDF Documents are commonly used across many industries and have almost become a global technical standard. For a digital document to be admissible in many courts, it must be created in the PDF Format. PDF documents cannot be altered without leaving electronic footprints. In addition to document-level security, they provide many other benefits. 

Your PDF documents look exactly the same everywhere, regardless of the hardware, operating system and application you used to view them. Unlike other formats, a PDF document does not lead to distortion of fonts when circulating it online or running on a machine that doesn’t have the required fonts installed.

If you’re looking to extract specific pages out of a PDF document, there are different ways to do so. In this article, we’ll discuss some paid and free methods.

Method 1: Using Adobe Acrobat DC (Paid)

Adobe Acrobat DC has a far superior page extracting technology that allows you to extract multiple pages of your document without compromising the page quality. However, Acrobat DC is NOT free.

1. 1. Open Adobe Acrobat DC and open the PDF file that contains the pages you want to extract.

1. 1. Click on the Tools menu, and select Organize Pages. Similarly, you can also use the Organize Pages icon from the right-hand side panel of the screen.

1. 1. Click on Extract.

1. 1. Select the pages you want to extract. Specify the page number (such as, 10) or select from a range of options available such as even pages, odd pages, landscape pages or portrait pages. To extract all the pages from your document, use the All Pages option.
      • • Optional: To remove the pages from the original document after extracting, select the Delete pages after extracting option.
      • Optional: To extract the pages as separate documents, use the Extract pages as separate files option.

1. Click on Extract.

Method 2: Using Nitro Pro (Paid)

You may use the Extract Pages Tool in Nitro PDF to accomplish this task.

1. 1. Open Nitro Pro and open the PDF document that contains the pages you want to extract.

1. 1. Click on the Pages button on the left-hand side panel of the screen.

1. 1. Press and hold down the Ctrl key, and select all the pages you want to extract.

1. 1. Right-click the selected pages and choose Extract Pages.

1. In the new dialog box that appears, click on Extract to proceed.

Method 3: Using Google Chrome (Free)

You can also extract pages from a Portable Document Format (PDF) using Google Chrome, regardless of whether it’s stored online or offline.

1. 1. Open your PDF Document in Google Chrome.
      • • If your PDF is available online, just type the full path to your PDF and it’ll open up.
      • If your PDF is stored locally on your hard disk, right-click your PDF Document and select Open With | Google Chrome.

1. 1. Click on the Print button.

1. 1. In the Destination drop-down box, select Save as PDF.

1. 1. In the Pages drop-down box, use the Custom option to extract specific pages or select All to save the entire PDF document.

1. 1. When you select the Custom option, enter the range of pages you want to extract (for example, type 5-10 for extracting all pages starting from Page 5 until Page 10.)

1. 1. Click on Save.

1. Specify a name for your new PDF Document and click on Save.

Method 4: Using an Online Tool (Free)

There are hundreds of small tools available that work straight from your browser without needing you to download anything. These web-based tools allow you to perform basic PDF editing tasks such as PDF pages extraction, PDF splitting, add numbering to your pages, delete specific pages, rotate the pages, convert PDF to other formats and vice versa, etc.

1. 1. Visit https://smallpdf.com/split-pdf.

1. 1. Drag and drop your PDF document into the website. Alternatively, you may click on Choose Files and select the PDF documents you want to extract.

1. 1. Wait for some time till your PDF is uploaded.

1. 1. Select Extract pages.

1. 1. Click on Extract.

1. 1. The SmallPDF tool will display thumbnails of the pages to make it easier to select them. Use the checkboxes on the upper left corner of the thumbnails to select specific pages of your choice.

1. 1. After selecting the pages, click on Extract.

1. Click on Download to save the file directly to your PC. To save the file to other cloud platforms, click on the drop-down menu icon and select one of the options from Save to Dropbox, Save to Google Drive, etc.

Caution: Online tools come with a major drawback: privacy concerns. You will never know if an online tool stores your PDF files on its servers and whether their backend team can access it or not. It is always advisable to avoid online tools for processing private and confidential PDF Documents. Also, if an online tool uses unsecured HTTP (instead of secured HTTPS), someone can sniff your network traffic in real-time and view and download the contents of your PDFs while they’re being transferred from your PC to the Web Server, and vice versa.