Remove PDF Pages

How do I say which pages to delete?

Type the page numbers your reader shows, separated by commas, with hyphens for runs: 1, 4-6, 12. Spaces do not matter, repeating a number does nothing extra, and a reversed range like 6-4 is read as 4-6. Pages are one-based — 1 is the first page, not the second.

Everything you list is removed and everything else is kept, in its original order.

I deleted pages 1, 3 and 5 and got the wrong ones. Is that a known bug?

Not here, but it is the classic bug in this kind of tool and worth understanding. Deleting a page renumbers every page after it. Remove page 1 from a six-page document and the old page 3 becomes page 2 — so a tool that works through your list from lowest to highest ends up deleting pages 1, 4 and 6 while reporting that it deleted 1, 3 and 5.

This tool removes from the highest page number downwards, so no page still waiting to be removed has shifted. There is a test covering exactly this case: removing 1, 3, 5 from a six-page document must leave the original pages 2, 4 and 6.

Can I delete every page?

No. A PDF must contain at least one page, so a range covering the whole document is refused rather than producing an empty or corrupt file. If you want nothing from the document, delete the file itself.

If you meant to keep only a few pages, Split PDF is the better tool — extracting 2, 5 is clearer than deleting everything else.

Does removing pages make the file smaller?

Usually, but by less than you might expect. The page is dropped from the document's page tree, but shared resources — embedded fonts, colour profiles, images referenced from more than one page — are not necessarily discarded with it. A 40-page document with one large embedded font set may lose ten pages and only a little size.

If size is the goal rather than page count, removing pages is the wrong lever.

Is my file uploaded?

No. pdf-lib reads the document inside this browser tab, the pages are removed in memory, and the download link is a blob URL your browser created locally. Nothing is sent anywhere, so there is no server-side copy to be kept or deleted. You can confirm this in your browser's Network tab, or by going offline once the page has loaded.

What happens to bookmarks and links pointing at deleted pages?

Bookmarks and internal links that targeted a removed page have nothing to point at, and behaviour there varies by viewer — some ignore them, some jump to the nearest surviving page. Bookmarks pointing at pages you kept continue to work.

Form fields on surviving pages are normally preserved. Digital signatures will not validate afterwards: a signature covers a specific document layout, and removing a page necessarily changes it. That applies to every page-removal tool, not just this one.