Splitting a PDF means taking some or all of its pages out into separate documents. The common reasons are practical: one page of a long scan needs to go to one person, a report has to be divided into sections for different recipients, the pages of a contract need signing separately, or an appendix should travel on its own.
This guide explains the two ways Filum splits a document, how to split at a particular page, what happens to the pages on the way out, what the files cost in size, and how to do a quick split with nothing but a browser's print dialog. Where a number is given, it was measured.
Two ways to split in Filum
When you open a PDF, every page is shown as a thumbnail, so you can see exactly what you are taking out rather than guessing from page numbers.
Split into single pages turns every page into its own PDF. A ten-page document becomes ten one-page files, delivered together as one ZIP archive. The archive is named after your file, and the files inside are numbered in page order — report.pdf gives report.zip containing report-01.pdf, report-02.pdf and so on. This is the right choice when each page is really a separate document: individual forms, receipts, or ID pages that need handling one by one.
Extract selected pages makes one new PDF from the pages you pick. Click the thumbnails to select pages; Select all and Clear do what they say, and the button shows how many pages you are extracting. The new document keeps the pages in their original order, whatever order you clicked them in, and is saved as report-selected.pdf. This covers pulling out a single page, a chapter, or any set of pages scattered through the document.
Splitting at a page into two parts
A common request is to divide a document at a page: pages 1 to 5 in one file, 6 to the end in another. Filum does this as two extractions rather than one step. Select pages 1 to 5 and extract them, then clear the selection, select the rest and extract again. Each extraction is instant on a normal document, and the two files are exactly the two halves.
The same approach splits a document into any number of sections: one extraction per section. For a document that was made by merging several files, this is how you get the original parts back.
What happens to the pages
The pages are copied into the new documents, not re-rendered. Text stays text — selectable, searchable, and as sharp as in the original — and images are carried across without being recompressed. A page you extract is the same page, in a smaller document.
The output also carries no trace of the tool that made it: no producer name, no creation date, no modification date. Measured on 2 September 2026, alongside the two best-known online splitters.
File size: the pages you keep and the download
On the same six-page test document, measured on the same day on all three sites (2 September 2026), the one-page files you end up keeping were the smallest from Filum: 7,727 bytes in total, against 9,055 bytes from Smallpdf and 10,612 from iLovePDF — 14.7% smaller than the better of the two.
The ZIP you download is a different story. Filum's archive was 7,862 bytes against Smallpdf's 7,469, about 5% larger. The reason is that Filum's files are already compressed inside, so the ZIP finds almost nothing left to squeeze, while Smallpdf ships larger files that compress well in the archive. The obvious fix was measured and rejected, because it would have made the files you keep larger to make the download smaller. On a real document the differences are a few kilobytes either way; they are reported here because they were measured, not because they decide anything.
Password-protected and damaged PDFs
A PDF that needs a password to open cannot be split until it is unlocked, and Filum says so directly: “This PDF is password-protected. Remove the password and try again.” If you know the password, the Unlock PDF tool removes it in your browser, and the unlocked copy can then be split. A file that is not a PDF, or is truncated, gets a message saying the file could not be read, rather than an empty download.
Splitting with the tools you already have
For a quick extraction, the print dialog of a browser or PDF viewer can do the job. Open the PDF in Chrome or Edge, choose Print, set the destination to Save as PDF, and enter a page range such as 3-7 under Pages. The result is a new PDF with just those pages. Two limitations: printing to PDF can re-render the pages, which may change how text is stored, and it produces one file at a time, so splitting every page of a long document this way is slow.
On a Mac, Preview does the same through File, Print, Pages, and Save as PDF in the PDF menu. Preview can also make single-page files by dragging a page thumbnail out of the sidebar into a Finder window.
No upload — everything in the browser
Filum's Split PDF tool runs entirely in your browser. The PDF is opened on your device, the pages you choose are copied into new documents by a library running in the page, and the results are saved to your downloads. Nothing is sent to a server. Once the page has loaded, splitting also works with the network switched off: that was measured for this tool on 12 September 2026.
Most online splitters work the other way round: the document is uploaded, split on a server and sent back. In the same September measurement, both of the best-known alternatives sent the document to a server, and one began uploading it the moment it was selected, before any button was pressed. For contracts, medical records or financial statements, a split that never leaves your device leaves nothing to intercept, log or delete.
Tips for long, scanned and many-page documents
On a long document the thumbnails appear as each page is drawn. The split and select buttons become usable as soon as the page count is known, so a button never offers to act on pages that have not loaded yet.
A scanned document splits exactly like any other, because the pages are copied as they are: each page of a scan stays a picture of a page. If you also want to search or copy the text in a scanned extract, run the new file through OCR PDF afterwards.
The single-pages option downloads a ZIP archive. On Windows, right-click it and choose Extract All; on a Mac, double-click it; on an iPhone or iPad, tap it in the Files app and it expands into a folder; on Android, most file managers offer Extract. If you only need one or two pages, Extract selected pages gives you a PDF directly, with no archive to open.
Splitting vs. extracting vs. organizing
Split PDF takes one PDF and produces several, or produces one smaller PDF from selected pages. Use it when you want parts of a document as their own files.
Extract images pulls the pictures that are embedded in a PDF back out as image files. Use it to recover the photos or graphics from a document, not to work with whole pages.
Organize PDF reorders and deletes pages within a single document and gives you one PDF back. Use it when you want to rearrange a document rather than divide it.