How to delete pages from a PDF without Adobe Acrobat

Posted on by John

How can you delete pages from a PDF file if you don’t have Adobe Acrobat?

Download PDFCreator from SourceForge. It installs as a printer. It lets you create PDFs from any application by selecting PDFCreator as your “printer.” To delete pages from an existing PDF, open the PDF in Adobe Reader and print to PDFCreator the pages you don’t want to delete.

I don’t have a lot of experience with PDFCreator; I just downloaded it today. But it looks good and it worked well for what I was trying to do.

Update: I tried pdftk, recommended in the comments, and it works well. It’s a command line program with more features than PDFCreator.

47 thoughts on “How to delete pages from a PDF without Adobe Acrobat”

  2. John

    Thanks, Gappy, that’s good to know. Pdftk is the kind of thing I was looking for but I ran across PDFCreator first.

  4. And just for completeness, Mac OSX comes built in with “Save as PDF” on the print dialogue, and with the ability to delete pages and re-save a PDF in the Preview app.

  5. Neil

    I’ve used PDFCreator for some time now (it’s basically a wrapper around GhostScript and RedMon, which you used to have to install manually.) It works great.

    I recently came across the PDFTK, for a similar task. I can recommend it, as well.

    Linux has the print to PDF/PS (PDF being a cut-down postscript) options, as well; plus OpenOffice prints to PDF natively.

  7. Jeff

    THANK YOU for this article and the link to pdftk. Without this article I would have spent hours trying to figure it out..

  8. Glenn

    THANK YOU all for your comments and advise, you have saved me a lot of time and trials.

  12. pdftk specifics; to delete the first page:

    pdftk original.pdf cat 2-end out new.pdf

    (Still a little boggled at syntax like “cat 2-end out”.)

  13. cancerofstomach

    I noticed the loss of word search functionality when using pdfcreator (didn’t try pdftk though)

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  16. Russ

    Although, not as conveient to use, you can also you the printing capabilities from the OS (I know this works under Linux and OS X). Just print the pages you want to PDF from the initial PDF file.

  17. Chris Beeley

    I’m super late to this party, but I just got to this page from Google and I thought I would chime in with the “print to pdf” functionality of NitroPdf (can even print to pdf from inside NitroPdf).

    I use it as default because of the excellent integration with Evernote but this is another reason to use it.

  21. Richard

    “To delete pages from an existing PDF, open the PDF in Adobe Reader and print to PDFCreator the pages you don’t want to delete.”
    GREAT ADVICE! WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF IT MYSELF?

  22. John

    Richard: The part you quoted isn’t as trivial as it sounds. You’re not really printing, but using a facility that is labeled “print” by analogy. “Printing” to PDFCreator makes a single PDF file with only the selected pages.

  23. dushko

    aside from many comments from people who don’t get the point and think printing to pdf-embedded pictures are the same as editing i will explain:
    guys,he asked for an editor, not a PRINTER, cause pdf creator is indeed a soft printer.
    and I love the spam of Nitro PDF staff (a commercial soft) promoting their crappy soft.

    as for the pdf printers- u take a 140kB pdf created in Ooo or MsW, print it to images with pdf creator or cute pdf leaving out the unwanted pages and you get bitmap scans of pages weighing 6megabytes, with no searchability, no editable form fields, dog slow load times etc. etc.

    indeed pdftk looks good and up to the task just a bit hard to learn.
    but it’s a knowledge worth practicing

    or you can edit the code in notepad, if you know the syntax…I don’t :-) – this was actually the search that took me to your site :-)

    and I like the purity of your site, as im on an Oled phone and have user css to spare some battery and your site is now nice black with ‘burlywood’ text.
    some designers just put all the background stuff to the foreground or use non css background elements which are hard to override without tears.

  25. kristen

    none of these suggestions are for non-computer programmers. i downloaded both suggested programs/printers/hack codes/whatever and can’t even understand how to begin how to work these. i hate adobe for not having a mac trial… all i want to do is delete some pdf pages!!

  26. Karen Joslin

    Barry Leiba, your tip about Preview in Mac saved me lots of time and hassle. All I needed to do was delete one page from my PDF, which otherwise would have involved me driving all the way across town, turning on my ancient PC with an ancient version of Acrobat, saving my PDF on a memory stick, etc….. You rock!

  27. Edward

    This tip seriously hangs my computer, hard reboot required sometimes. Wish it DID work. Still need utility for deleting pdf pages.

  33. Anonymous

    I just installed PDFCreator from SourceForge and it shut down my internet browser and tried to install malicious adware. Thankfully my Anti-Virus program detected it right away and blocked it. I promptly uninstalled and program.

  34. Anon

    pdftk works really well. i recommend it to everyone else here. quick and easy, no memory-wasting gui required.

  35. Anonymous

    You can also use Google Chrome’s built-in PDF viewer:

    – Drag and drop the PDF file to Chrome.
    – Click print and then choose “Save as PDF”.
    – In the Pages section on the left side, type the page numbers you want to keep.
    – Click Save and you’re done.

  39. Milo

    If you are running OSX it is even easier.

    – Open the PDF with preview.
    – In the sidebar just select and delete pages

  40. Casandra More

    I found an even better free and supersimple way to do it online.

    http://www.smallpdf.com

    Awesome features, completely free and split and combine in one…just the thing I needed.

    Please mention that in your post, a lot of usersdon’t qwant to install software.

  41. Jade Mitchell

    For all those recommending online tools, have you ever thought who it is you are providing your documents to? Not really an answer that should be contemplated except for documents already within the public domain

  42. Jay

    PDFtk works like magic
    even the free version, which is sufficient for me to delete some pages
    thanks a million for the post

  43. WGT

    The free version of PDF XChange Editor has a function to extract PDF pages in a new PDF document. Additionally, it is a perfect replacement of Adobe Reader.

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