Tim Fisher has more than 30 years' of professional technology experience. He's been writing about tech for more than two decades and serves as the SVP and General Manager of Lifewire.
Updated on September 26, 2022A PDF splitter is used to splice a PDF file into pieces. You might do this if you only want one or two (or more) pages from the document and the rest to be removed, or if the PDF is too large for whatever you want it for.
This might sound like a complicated procedure, but it's actually very easy to do. There are several online and offline options that work in just a few clicks. In fact, you might even already have a program installed on your computer that can do the job.
Most of the picks from our list below give you a few options: "explode" the document into multiple files where each page of the original becomes its own PDF, extract one (or more) specific pages, or delete particular parts of the PDF so you're left with just the portion of the original that you want.
When extracting specific pages from the PDF, you're often given the option to split in half so that one PDF holds the first half of the pages and the other has the second half. For example, you could split a 100-page document so that you have two separate PDFs, each with 50 pages.
Another way these separators work is by letting you pick a range of pages. Maybe your file has 225 pages, but you only want pages 10–50 and 223–225. In this scenario, you'd split into two separate PDFs, both containing only the pages you chose to extract. Some splitters even let you merge your split page ranges—for this, the PDF would just contain pages 10 through 225, with 1–9 and 51–222 removed.
A few of the better PDF splitters can also cut the document by size, a perfect solution if yours is too large to upload to a website, send over email, etc. Just choose the size you want each piece to be, and the program will split the PDF into as many pieces as necessary to ensure that each file is under the size you've specified.