Split, extract and reorder PDF pages without losing quality

• **Split** — one document becomes several files, usually one per page or one per range. Use it when different parts of a document go to different places.
• **Extract** — a subset of pages becomes one new document. Use it when you need pages 4, 7 and 12 together and nothing else.
• **Reorder** — the same pages, in a different sequence. Use it when the content is right but the order is not.
• **Rotate** — often the companion job: scans that came in sideways are the most common reason a sequence looks wrong when it is not.

Ranges are written compactly: `1-3` means pages one to three, `5` alone means just page five, and `7-` means page seven to the end. Combining them with commas — `1-3, 5, 9-` — is how you describe an arbitrary set in one line. Numbers always count from the start of the document, no matter which direction the reader's numbering runs.

1. 1Look at the thumbnails before you type anything. Page 1 of a PDF is often a cover, and numbering that starts on a title page is a classic source of off-by-one errors.
2. 2Describe the set you want in the tool: Split PDF for several outputs, Extract PDF Pages for one output.
3. 3Confirm the output count matches what you expected — three ranges should give three files.
4. 4Open each result and check the first and last page. Two seconds of checking beats a bounced submission.

Page-level operations copy the existing page objects; they do not rasterise anything. Text stays selectable, vectors stay vectors, and no quality is lost — which is exactly why screenshotting a page and rebuilding it is never the right approach.

Reorder PDF pages shows thumbnails so pages are identified by what they look like rather than by number alone. Move one page at a time, or reverse the whole document in a single action when a scan came out backwards. Reordering is the fastest fix for a document that was assembled from several sources in the wrong sequence.

• Move a page with the ordering controls rather than deleting and re-inserting — deletion risks losing a page you meant to keep.
• Reverse is a good first test: if a document scans end-first, one reversal usually fixes all of it.
• Rotate the odd page first, then reorder — the thumbnail then matches what you expect to see in the final file.

Splitting does not change page size, so a 10-page A4 document split five and five gives two A4 documents. If the pieces must be a different size for printing or submission, handle that afterwards with Document Print Prep, which re-paginates without rasterising. If the pieces must be under a byte limit, splitting itself usually helps a great deal, because each file only carries its own pages' images — see meeting a file size requirement.