How to Extract Pages from a PDF

You need pages 3 to 5 of a long PDF as their own file. Every platform can do this with a built-in tool, and the original stays untouched.

Select the pages in Preview on Mac

Open the PDF in Preview and choose View, Thumbnails. Click the first page you want, then Shift-click the last for a range or Cmd-click for individual pages.

Drag them to the desktop

Drag the selected thumbnails out of the sidebar and drop them on the desktop or into a Finder window. Preview creates a new PDF containing only those pages. Rename it as needed.

Or print the range to a new PDF

If dragging does not suit you, choose File, Print. Under Pages, choose From and type the first and last page numbers. Click the PDF dropdown in the bottom left, choose Save as PDF, name the file, and click Save. This also works in any app that opens PDFs.

Print a page range in Chrome or Edge on Windows

Open the PDF in Chrome or Edge and press Ctrl + P. Set Destination or Printer to Save as PDF in Chrome or Microsoft Print to PDF in Edge. Under Pages, choose Custom and type a range such as 3-5, or a list such as 2, 7, 9. Click Save or Print and name the new file.

Save a range on iPhone

Open the PDF in the Files app, tap the share button, and tap Print. Set Range to the pages you want. Tap the share button at the top of the print preview to save the selected pages as a new PDF to Files, or send them by Mail or Messages.

To delete pages instead. In Preview, select the unwanted thumbnails in the sidebar, press the Delete key, and choose File, Save. In Files on iPhone, open the page sidebar, touch and hold a page, and tap Delete. Both change the original file, so duplicate it first if you may need those pages later.

Privacy. Web tools such as Acrobat online, Smallpdf, and iLovePDF split PDFs too, but they upload the whole document to a server. The built-in methods above never send the file anywhere.