How to Split a PDF Into Separate Files
Splitting comes up more often than merging does, in practice — a scanner that dumps forty pages into a single file when you only needed to send page 12 to your accountant, or a report where a colleague only wants the appendix, not the whole 80-page document.
Steps
- Open the Split PDF tool and upload your file.
- Choose whether you want every page broken out as its own file, or a specific page range pulled out as one chunk.
- Download the result — either a set of single-page files or the one range you asked for.
Splitting vs. extracting — a distinction worth knowing
"Split" and "extract" sound like the same job but solve slightly different problems. Splitting is for when you want to break the whole document apart, page by page or range by range. If you only care about a handful of specific pages scattered through a longer document — page 3, page 9, and page 14, say — the PDF Page Extractor is the more direct tool, since it lets you hand-pick exactly which pages go into the new file rather than working through contiguous ranges.
A note on scanned multi-document batches
If the PDF you're splitting is really several unrelated documents that got scanned together as one file (this happens constantly with office scanners set to "scan to PDF"), it's worth opening the file first and noting down the page numbers where each document starts, before you touch the splitting tool. Nothing about splitting will find those boundaries for you automatically.