Remove some pages from PDF and other PDF-editing operations

Acrobat Reader is a free program, but does not contain nothing around editing (with small exception). So operations like removing some pages, rotating some or all pages, converting PDF to other format, extracting pages to graphic format like JPEG, merging two and more PDF files etc. are not available in Acrobat Reader. For these you have to either purchase a paid, full version of Adobe PDF or seek for some other tools or options.

This post discuss a variety of ways and methods of removing certain pages from PDF document and doing some other editing operation on such docs.

There are two general approaches to PDF editing operations. You can use any of direct methods, that is — direct PDF file modification. Which usually require to install some software or browser plugin. Or can be done on-line, but is usually limited in PDF file size, page count etc.

You can also use some of non-direct methods, which results in converting PDF file into some external format (for example Word’s DOCX), do all the editing stuff and converting new document back to new PDF file.

Direct methods

Here is a short list of few free programs useful for PDF document modification:

Read also this document for more info.

I was using PDFill Tools Free and was quite amazed on how many things I can done with this free tools. I would recommend it to anyone. The only side effect (actually a big fuckup) was that it installs a virtual to PDF printer in your system, without asking you whether you want it or not. And also without asking you for an agreement, it changes system default printer to that one newly installed. Really bad practice.

Chrome extensions

If you have Google Chrome, you may consider some of extensions available for it:

But, be careful, cause I heard, that many of these extensions may be outdated, not do their job as supposed to or don’t work at all.

Online services

There are many online services, which you can consider for this task. For example:

This is very limited list. If you search the web for “online PDF edit” you’ll find more of them (paid and free).

Adobe tools and other non-direct methods

If you have a full version of Adobe PDF, you can find instruction of removing certain pages here or here.

If you have any virtual PDF printer installed, like:

and you’re only looking for a simple page remove (no other editing operations), you can simply open your PDF document in Acrobat Reader and order it to print only certain pages or page ranges to that virtual printer.

It result you’ll receive a newly created PDF document, that contains only pages selected by you.

Adobe Reader provides access to CreatePDF Online service (see File menu after opening a PDF document). However, this is a paid service and you’re required to pay 20 EUR per year (or equivalent in your local currency) for access to ExportPDF only service or 80 EUR / year for also access to CreatePDF service.

Far to expensive, as for me.

Leave a Reply