Extract pages from a PDF — range syntax, lossless, US lawyer-grade

Yes — fully free, no signup, no credit card, no daily cap. Smallpdf caps the free tier at 2 tasks per day, iLovePDF at 1 file per hour for unregistered users, Sejda at 3 tasks per hour with a 50 MB / 50-page ceiling, and Adobe Acrobat online at 2 free extractions before the $19.99/month Acrobat Pro paywall kicks in. iFillPDF extracts unlimited PDFs, up to 100 MB per file — the ceiling of the drop zone, and comfortably above what a browser tab handles well anyway.

The page content is lossless: no recompression, no font subsetting changes, no colour profile flattening — a kept page is identical to the original, which is what makes the output a reasonably usable form under FRCP Rule 34(b)(2)(E) for production into PACER CM-ECF (35 MB per document cap). What extraction does not carry over is document-level state: PDF/A conformance, the outline, document metadata such as creator and modification history, and any digital signature, all of which belong to the original file rather than to its pages. In a discovery context that matters — if authenticating metadata is part of what you must produce, produce the original file alongside the extract.

Adobe Acrobat Pro ($19.99/month, $239.88/year) gives unlimited extraction inside the desktop or Document Cloud app but every page route through Adobe servers in the United States — subject to the Cloud Act. Smallpdf ($9/month after the 2-document daily free cap) and iLovePDF Premium ($7/month after the 1-file-per-hour free cap) re-render through their cloud pipeline. PDF24 ($0, ad-funded) and Sejda ($7.50/month after a 50 MB / 50-page free cap) are German-hosted but still upload your bytes. Soda PDF Premium ($7.99/month) and pdfFiller ($20/month) follow the same cloud-upload model. iFillPDF runs the extractor locally in WebAssembly, so the PDF never leaves your tab — and the metadata mirror sits in EU Frankfurt under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, not under US Cloud Act jurisdiction.

Yes — extraction runs 100% in your browser, so under GDPR Art. 4(2) no processing happens on our servers. The optional metadata mirror is hosted in Frankfurt eu-central-1 (Hetzner Falkenstein) under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, outside the reach of 50 USC §3024 and FISA 702. AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.3 in transit, SOC 2 Type II controls. HIPAA-friendly under 45 CFR §164.316(b)(2) records retention rules, no AI training on your PDFs, and temporary artefacts auto-purge within 24 hours.

You can extract the page, but the signature will not come with it — and no tool can change that. A PAdES or Adobe Sign signature cryptographically covers the entire document it was applied to, so the moment pages are pulled into a new file the signature no longer validates. The practical approach for court production: file the extract as your exhibit and produce the full signed original alongside it as the authenticating record, or have the extract re-signed by the signer. The extract itself is still a valid PDF for federal e-filing into PACER CM-ECF (35 MB per document, 4 KB filename cap) and for the FRCP-mirrored ESI rules most states follow.

IRS records retention under 26 USC §6001 generally requires 7 years for tax returns and supporting records, with no time limit on fraudulent-return material. HIPAA covered entities must keep policies, procedures and audit trails for 6 years under 45 CFR §164.316(b)(2). If your retention policy calls for PDF/A-2b (ISO 19005-2) archival format, note that this extractor does not produce it and does not preserve PDF/A conformance from the source — the extract is a plain PDF. Convert it afterwards with a dedicated PDF/A tool, or keep the original conformant file as the archived record and treat the extract as a working copy.

Unlock it first with our free unlock tool, which also runs entirely in your browser, so the password never reaches a server — then drop the unlocked file into the extractor. Owner-restricted PDFs, where the document owner has blocked printing or extraction, cannot be opened by any tool without the owner password, Adobe Acrobat Pro included. iFillPDF respects that restriction and surfaces a clear error rather than silently bypassing it.

No — whatever order you type the ranges in, the pages come out in ascending source order. Typing 12, 2, 7, 5-6 gives you pages 2, 5, 6, 7 and 12 in that sequence, not the one you listed. The fix takes ten seconds: run the extract through our free reorder tool, which moves pages up and down one click at a time and also runs in your browser. Adobe Acrobat online behaves the same way on extract; pdfFiller forces a separate reorder workflow; Smallpdf and iLovePDF accept reorder via thumbnail drag on a second screen.