How to delete pages from a PDF

Deleting pages takes a couple of clicks in PDF by Zaweba. Choose the pages in the thumbnails panel and press Delete, or use Pages > Delete, then save the file. The whole deletion counts as one undo step, so Ctrl+Z puts every page back if you took the wrong ones.

People most often need this for blank pages from a scanner, a cover sheet nobody wants, out-of-date pages in a long document, or pages with private details that shouldn't go to everyone.

Picking the pages to remove

The thumbnails panel shows small versions of every page. If it's not showing, press F4. Click one page to choose it. Hold Ctrl and click to add others one at a time, or Shift+click to choose everything between the first and the page you click.

Pages > Select pages helps with bigger jobs. Type a list of page numbers, or choose all the odd pages, all the even pages, all the landscape pages or all the portrait pages. Choosing the even pages, for example, quickly picks out the blank backs of a document scanned double-sided.

If no thumbnails are chosen, the page commands act on the page you're looking at.

Deleting them

With the pages chosen, press Delete, or right-click one of the thumbnails and choose it from the menu, or use Pages > Delete. The pages disappear from the document and the rest close up.

The change isn't written to the file until you save. That gives you a moment to scroll through and make sure the right pages have gone. If you want to keep the original as it was, use Save as and give the new version a different name.

Undo, and getting it back later

Each deletion is one named step, so Ctrl+Z undoes it all, and Ctrl+Y does it again. If you've made several changes and want to start over, Revert to saved goes back to the version on disk.

Once you've saved and closed, the pages are gone from that file. Keeping a copy of the original before removing pages is a good habit for anything important.

When deleting isn't the right tool

Deleting a page removes it from view, but it isn't the same as securely removing information from a document. If the reason for deleting is privacy, think about the whole file. PDF by Zaweba has Protect > Remove hidden information, which lists what else a PDF carries, such as document details, attached files and comments, and a redaction tool for removing text from pages you're keeping.

If you want to keep the pages but in a separate file, use Pages > Extract instead. It can take pages out into a new document and delete them from the original in one go.

And some PDFs are set up by their owners so pages can't be changed. In that case the delete command says so, rather than quietly doing nothing.

Tidying a long document

Deleting is often part of a bigger tidy-up. The Organise pages grid (Ctrl+Shift+O) turns the thumbnails into a full-window view of the whole document with every page command to hand, which makes it much easier to spot blank pages, delete them, rotate the sideways ones and drag the rest into order in one sitting.

PDF by Zaweba is free software for Windows. It works offline with no account, so your documents stay on your computer while you tidy them.