How to extract pages from a PDF
- Note the pages you need
Open the document in the reader and write the numbers down as you go.
- Enter the selection
Commas separate items, hyphens make ranges. An open-ended range like 12- runs to the last page.
- Choose one file or many
One combined document is usually what you want. Separate files suit building a bank of individual questions.
- Extract
The new document contains only the pages you named, in the order you wrote them.
Why this matters for exam and study documents
Build a topic pack. Extract every mechanics question from six years of papers into one file, and you have a targeted worksheet that no publisher sells, assembled from material you already have.
What is kept, what changes, and what this will not do
Page operations copy content rather than re-rendering it, so nothing here costs quality. What changes is which pages exist and where they sit - and the numbering printed on them stops matching.
Kept
- Page content, fonts, images and vector diagrams
- Page size and orientation
- Form fields on the extracted pages
Changed
- Page numbering restarts at 1 in the new file
- Bookmarks and links pointing at discarded pages are dropped
- Metadata is not carried across
Limits
- Page numbers count the file's pages from 1, whatever is printed on them.
Questions and answers
Can I reorder pages while extracting?
Yes. The pages come out in the order you write them, so 9, 1-3 puts page 9 at the front. For reordering a whole document, Organize PDF is more direct.
Does this change the original file?
No. Nothing here writes to your source file. The result is a new document.
Can I extract the same page twice?
Yes. Writing 4, 4 gives you two copies of page 4, which is occasionally useful for building a worksheet.