Pages end up in the wrong order all the time. A scanner feeds a stack backwards, someone exports an appendix in the middle, or a 40-page report has a blank page and two drafts of the cover you need to get rid of before it goes out.
There are three tools for this on EddiesPDF, and they overlap on purpose. Organize pages does everything at once: reorder, delete, rotate, duplicate, add blank pages and mix in other PDFs. Delete pages and Extract pages each do one job with fewer clicks.
Which tool for which job
- The order is wrong, or you need several kinds of changes: Organize pages.
- You want to drop a few pages and keep the rest: Delete pages.
- You want a few pages as a separate file and the rest left alone: Extract pages.
Delete and Extract are mirror images, so pick whichever means less clicking. Removing 3 pages from 40 is quicker in Delete pages. Keeping 3 out of 40 is quicker in Extract pages.
All three run in your browser, so the PDF isn't uploaded, and none of them change your original file. You download a new copy each time.
Reordering pages in Organize pages
- Open Organize pages and add your PDF. Every page appears as a thumbnail.
- Drag a page to where it should go. On a touch screen, drag it by the grip handle so the page still scrolls normally.
- For a long move, select the pages, type a number in "Move to position" and click "Move".
- Use the buttons on each thumbnail to rotate, duplicate, delete or insert a blank page after it.
- Click "Organize pages" and download the result, saved as yourfile-organized.pdf.
Dragging page 47 to position 3 in a long document gets old fast, which is what "Move to position" is for. Select one or more pages and they move together, in their current order, so the first lands at the number you typed.
Once you've selected pages (click, or Shift-click for a range), a bar appears with "Left", "Right", "Duplicate" and "Delete" for all of them at once. You can also type ranges such as "1-3, 5, 8-" and click "Select".
A few toolbar buttons cover the common cases. "Reverse order" fixes a stack that went through the scanner last page first. "+ Add blank page" puts an empty page at the end, and the plus button on a thumbnail inserts one right after that page. Blank pages take the size of their neighbour, which is handy when a document will be printed double-sided and a chapter should start on a fresh sheet. "Add PDF" brings in the pages of other files so you can mix them in. Each file then gets a coloured letter (A, B, C) on its thumbnails so you can tell them apart.
The labels under each thumbnail show where a page came from. "5 (p.2)" means it's now in position 5 and was page 2 of the original. Undo and redo cover every step, and Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y work too.
Deleting pages
In Delete pages, click the pages you want gone. They get a red cross. Click again to unmark one. Shift-click marks a range, or type something like "1-10" or "15-" (page 15 to the end) and press "Mark".
The line above the thumbnails keeps count, like "Deleting 3 (2, 5-6), keeping 37.", and the button changes to "Delete 3 pages". Mark every page and it refuses, since a PDF needs at least one page.
Extracting pages into a new file
Extract pages works the same way, but the pages you select are the ones you keep. The "Output" menu decides how they're packaged:
- "One PDF with all selected pages"
- "A separate PDF for each page"
- "A separate PDF for each range", where a range is each run of consecutive pages, so selecting 1-3 and 9-10 gives two files
When there's more than one file, they download together as a ZIP. Under "More options", "Output file names" lets you name them with a pattern using [BASENAME], [FILENUMBER] and [CURRENTPAGE].
One thing that catches people out: extracted pages always come out in their original order, whatever order you clicked them in. If you want page 9 before page 2 in the new file, extract them and then reorder in Organize pages. And if you're cutting a whole document into parts rather than pulling out a few pages, splitting a PDF has more options.
What happens to bookmarks, links and form fields
A PDF isn't stored page by page. It's a pool of objects (fonts, images, text streams, form fields) with a list of pages that point into it. Removing a page from that list is easy. Removing everything that only that page used is the part some tools skip, which can leave a deleted page's images and text still sitting in the file, invisible but recoverable.
Delete pages cleans up properly. Objects used only by the deleted pages are removed, and so are form fields that only appeared on them and links on the remaining pages that jumped to a deleted page. Bookmarks pointing at a deleted page are dropped and the rest are kept. If you'd rather lose them all, tick "Discard bookmarks" under "More options".
Organize pages and Extract pages build a fresh PDF and copy in only the pages you kept, so nothing from the dropped pages comes along. Both keep the bookmarks that point at pages still in the file, and Extract pages has the same "Discard bookmarks" option.
The limits
These tools move whole pages. They can't split one page into two, change the page size or edit what's on a page. For those, look at Split in half, Crop PDF or Edit PDF.
Password-protected files work too. You'll be asked for the password when you add the file (files that only have editing restrictions open without one), and the saved copy has no password. Run it through Protect PDF afterwards if it needs one.
Long documents are fine. Thumbnails are drawn as you scroll, so a few hundred pages usually load without trouble on a laptop, though a huge scanned file can still be slow on an older phone.
Printed page numbers don't move
If the document already has page numbers printed in the footer, reordering or deleting pages won't update them. They're part of the page, the same as any other text, so the page that was 7 still says 7 wherever you put it. A document that never had numbers is the easy case: sort out the pages first, then add page numbers as the very last step.
Also useful: Delete pages · Extract pages
