Split PDF

There are two ways to break a PDF apart. One is to rasterise each page into an image and wrap the image in a new document, which is what a lot of quick tools do because it is easy. The other is to copy the page object itself, along with the fonts, vector paths and images it references, into a fresh document. This tool does the second.

The practical difference shows up the moment you open a result. Text stays selectable and searchable rather than becoming a picture of text. Vector diagrams stay vector, so they remain sharp at any zoom. Embedded images keep their original resolution instead of being resampled to whatever the rasteriser guessed. And nothing is recompressed, so there is no generational quality loss at all.

What you get back

Every page becomes its own PDF, and they arrive together as a single ZIP. The files are named after the source document with a zero-padded page number, so a 120-page report produces page-001 through page-120 and they sort correctly in any file manager rather than putting page 100 immediately after page 10.

If you wanted a specific range rather than every page separately, split first and then use the merge tool to staple the pages you actually want back into one document. It is two steps instead of one, but it composes from the same lossless page-copying operation rather than needing a separate code path.

Two things that surprise people

Document-level features do not survive a page copy, because they are not properties of any single page. Bookmarks and the outline tree, interactive form fields, and the document-wide structures that some annotations hang off are attached to the document rather than the page, so single-page output loses them. Page content itself, including its text and images, comes through intact.

The other surprise is size. Splitting a document rarely produces pieces that add up to the original, and often they add up to considerably more. A PDF stores each font and each repeated image once and references it from every page that uses it. Once each page is its own document, each of those pages needs its own copy of the fonts it uses. A report with a heavy embedded typeface can easily grow overall when split, even though no page gained any content.