How to delete pages from a PDF (and make sure they're really gone)

A blank page from the scanner, a duplicate, the page with your salary or your ID number: removing pages from a PDF is one of the most common edits — and one of the few that Windows can't do out of the box.

On a Mac: Preview

1. Duplicate the file first (Preview edits the original).
2. Open it in Preview and choose View → Thumbnails.
3. Select the pages to remove (hold ⌘ for several) and press Delete.
4. Choose File → Save.

On Windows: the print trick

Open the PDF in Chrome or Edge, press Ctrl + P, choose Save as PDF and type the pages to keep under Pages (for example 1-3, 5-8). It works, but it re-prints the document, so links and fillable fields are usually lost.

In any browser, with page previews

A visual organizer shows every page as a thumbnail: click the pages to delete, check the result, save. Because it edits the PDF rather than re-printing it, links, form fields and text stay exactly as they were.

Removing a confidential page? Make sure it's really gone

A PDF is a container of objects. A careless editor can drop a page from the page list while its text and images stay inside the file, invisible but recoverable by anyone who knows where to look. When you remove a page for privacy reasons, use a tool that deletes the page's content from the saved file — FileMoat's organizer does — and check the file size went down.

Only need a few pages?

If you want to keep 3 pages out of 50, extracting them is quicker than deleting 47.