Splitting a PDF is one of those tasks that seems trivial until you are staring at a 40-page contract and only need pages 3 through 7. There are really only two ways people need to split a document, and picking the right one saves a lot of clicking.
Extracting a page range
This is the right choice when you need a contiguous chunk of a document — a chapter, an appendix, or a signed section of a contract. The output is a single new PDF containing only the pages you specified, in their original order.
Splitting into single pages
This is useful when every page needs to become its own file, for example when uploading individual pages to a government portal that only accepts one page per document, or when archiving scanned forms separately. The output is usually delivered as a zip file containing one PDF per page.
A quick way to decide
Ask yourself: will I ever need these pages back together as one file? If yes, extract a range. If every page has its own separate destiny, split into individual files.
A note on page numbers
Most tools count pages the way you see them in a PDF viewer, starting from page 1. Double-check the total page count before typing a range, since off-by-one mistakes are the most common error when splitting documents.
Need to split a document right now?
Open Split PDF