Delete pages
What Delete pages actually does
Throwing out a page should cost you that page and nothing else. Most tools rebuild the document from its sheets alone, so the navigation panel empties, anything fillable stops working, and the name in the window bar becomes whichever library did the rebuilding. Nobody is warned, and the damage usually surfaces weeks later when the original is long gone. Here the document survives its own trimming. What you tick leaves; everything else stays in the sequence it was already in. Navigation entries aimed at surviving sheets are renumbered to follow them, entries aimed at discarded sheets are thrown out with them instead of being left aimed at whatever slid into that slot, anything already typed into a surviving sheet is still typed into it, and the name, author, subject and keywords stay exactly as they were. Ask for a sheet the document does not have and you are told so; ask for the lot and you are stopped.
How to use it
- Pick a document. Before a single sheet moves, this tab reports how long it is, how many navigation entries and fillable boxes it holds, and how much disk it takes.
- Tick what should go, or write it out: bare numbers, spans such as 5-7, unbounded spans such as 9-, and the shorthand odd, even and end. Ticks and writing follow one another, and five shortcuts jump to everything, nothing, odd, even, or whatever is not currently ticked.
- Read the summary. It counts what the document holds and spells out the fate of each kind of content under the choice currently made, while there is still time to change it.
- Confirm, then take away the shortened document and a JSON note recording which original sheets ended up in it and how much of the navigation and how many of the fillable boxes travelled with them.
Useful for
- Throw out the blank sheets a duplex scanner slipped between originals, and still open the result at the chapter you wanted.
- Circulate an agreement with the internal costings gone while the countersigned sheet stays fillable and filled.
- Prune the wrapper and the trailing matter off a long report without flattening its navigation panel.
Limits worth knowing
- One document at a time, unprotected, at most 50 MiB, leaving at most 200 sheets behind. Protected or damaged files stop the job by name. Its terminal counterpart works at any length.
- Naming a sheet the document does not hold stops the job instead of quietly meaning nothing, and asking for all of them stops it too, so the answer is never a document with nothing in it.
- Navigation aimed at a discarded sheet goes with it and is never re-aimed. Cross references, attached files, printed sheet labels, accessibility structure and layered content that lean on discarded sheets do not travel.
- Cryptographic signing does not survive, since what was signed is not what comes back.
Questions people ask
Does deleting pages from a PDF destroy the bookmarks?
In most tools yes, and here too until this release: a document holding six navigation entries came back holding none of them. Each entry belonging to a surviving sheet is now re-aimed at that sheet's new position, and the note that comes with the download says how many of the entries found made the journey.
What happens to a form I have already filled in?
Anything typed into a sheet that stays is still there afterwards, and the shortened document is given back the dictionary a reader needs in order to show it. A box that only ever existed on a discarded sheet leaves with that sheet.
I typed a page number that does not exist. What happens?
The job stops and says which number was wrong and how long the document actually is. It is emphatically not read as an instruction to change nothing, which would hand back an untouched file wearing a success message.
Can I remove every page?
No, and the attempt is stopped in words. A document holding nothing has never been what anybody was after.
Does anything leave my machine?
Nothing does. Opening, previewing, trimming and saving all run inside this tab from code shipped with the page.