How to Split a PDF Privately, No Upload, In Your Browser

The problem with every common PDF splitter

Picture this: your accountant asks for a single invoice from last October. You have all twelve months bundled in one PDF that your bank sent you in January. The file is 38 pages long. You need page 9.

You search for "split PDF" and land on one of the big tools: iLovePDF, Smallpdf, PDF2Go, or Adobe Acrobat Online. You drag the file in. The tool uploads it to a server somewhere. Processing happens remotely. You download the result.

You got your page. But your bank statement, with your account number, your balance, your full transaction history, your name and address, just spent time on a server you know nothing about. Their privacy policy says they delete files after an hour, or maybe 24 hours. But there is no way to verify that. You do not know who else has access to that server. You do not know where it is hosted or what their security posture looks like.

I built the SammaPix PDF Splitter specifically to solve this. It runs entirely in your browser using pdf-lib, an open-source JavaScript PDF library. The file never leaves your device. No server processes it. No server stores it. The split happens on your CPU, in your browser tab, and the output is downloaded directly from browser memory.

How to verify it yourself

If you want proof rather than my word, open the browser's developer tools (F12 on Windows/Linux, Command Option I on Mac), go to the Network tab, and drop a PDF into the splitter. Watch the network requests. You will see requests for the page assets when the tool loads, and nothing else when you perform the split. No outgoing request carries your file. The PDF processing is entirely local.

The three ways to split a PDF

Not all splitting is the same. There are three distinct operations, and knowing which one you need will save you time. Here is a breakdown of each mode in SammaPix:

All three modes produce clean PDFs with no watermark. The extract-range and split-every-N modes produce a single PDF download. The split-into-individual-pages mode produces a ZIP file.

How to split a PDF in your browser, step by step

The process is the same regardless of which split mode you choose. Here is the full walkthrough:

1. Go to sammapix.com/tools/pdf-split in any modern browser: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge. No account required.
2. Drop your PDF onto the tool or click to browse for it. The file is read locally. Nothing is uploaded.
3. Choose your split mode. Select extract a page range, split into individual pages, or split every N pages.
4. Enter your parameters. For range extraction, type the pages you want, for example: 1-3 for pages 1 to 3, or 1,4,7 for those three specific pages, or 1-3,5,8-10 for a combination. For the split-every-N mode, enter the chunk size.
5. Click Split. pdf-lib processes the document locally. For a typical PDF this takes under a second on any modern device.
6. Download your output. The resulting PDF (or ZIP file for individual-page splits) is offered for download directly from browser memory. It never touched a server.

Page range syntax reference

The page range field accepts flexible input. Here are the common patterns:

• 1-5: extract pages 1 to 5 inclusive.
• 3: extract only page 3.
• 1,4,7: extract pages 1, 4, and 7.
• 1-3,5,8-10: extract pages 1 to 3, then page 5, then pages 8 to 10.

Pages are numbered from 1. You cannot go above the total page count of your document (the tool shows the count after you drop the file).

Who actually needs to split PDFs privately

The privacy concern is not abstract. These are the real cases where uploading a PDF to a third-party server creates genuine risk:

Accountants and financial professionals

Banks send annual statements as multi-page PDFs. An accountant might need only the Q4 pages, or a single month. Uploading a client's bank statement to iLovePDF means that statement, which contains the client's full name, account number, IBAN, balance, and every transaction, just went to a server. In many jurisdictions this creates a data protection liability under GDPR Article 5 if the server is outside the EU or if the tool is not a vetted data processor.

Lawyers and legal professionals

Legal bundles are often enormous, combining dozens of contracts, correspondence, and exhibits into a single PDF. When a lawyer needs to extract one signed contract or one exhibit to send to opposing counsel, uploading the entire bundle to a consumer PDF tool exposes privileged communications and confidential client data to a third party. Attorney-client privilege is a serious concern here. The safest approach is local processing, always.

HR and people operations

Employment contracts, salary information, performance reviews, and disciplinary records often arrive as bundled PDFs that HR needs to split into individual employee files. These documents contain personally identifiable information, salary figures, and potentially sensitive medical or personal details. Processing them on a consumer upload-based tool is not something most data protection officers would approve.

Healthcare workers

Medical records and test results sometimes arrive as multi-patient PDFs, or a patient's full record needs to be split into individual episodes. HIPAA in the United States and similar regulations elsewhere create strict rules about where patient data can be processed. A consumer PDF tool is not a HIPAA Business Associate. Splitting medical PDFs in the browser ensures patient data stays on the device.

Anyone with a personal document

You do not need to be a professional for this to matter. A passport scan, a lease agreement, a medical bill, a tax return: these are documents most people split at some point, and all of them contain information that should not leave your device unnecessarily.

Why uploading a sensitive PDF is a real risk

The privacy policies of major PDF tools describe what they do with your files. Here is what the typical language actually means in practice:

"We delete your files within 1 hour" means your file is on their servers for up to 1 hour

During that hour, the file can in principle be accessed by anyone with access to that server: sysadmins, contractors, attackers who have breached the server, or law enforcement with a warrant. You have no way to verify the deletion actually happens on schedule, or that backups are also deleted.

"We use encryption in transit" means the file is protected while moving to their server, not while on it

HTTPS protects the file while it travels from your browser to their server. Once it arrives, it is decrypted so their server can process it. At that point the protection of your data depends entirely on their internal security practices, not on you.

"We do not share your files with third parties" still allows for subprocessors

Most consumer tools run on AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure. Their privacy policy may technically be accurate while still meaning your file sits on an Amazon-managed server, in a data center operated by Amazon, where Amazon employees have physical access to the hardware. For most documents this is a minor concern. For financial or medical data, it matters.

I am not saying these companies are malicious. I am saying the risk is structural and real, and it is entirely avoidable by using a tool that processes the file locally.

Upload-based tools vs browser-based tools: an honest comparison

Here is an objective breakdown of how the two approaches compare across the dimensions that actually matter:

If you are handling personal or sensitive documents professionally, the browser-based approach is not just convenient: it eliminates an entire category of risk and compliance headache.

Split vs merge vs redact: which operation do you need?

People sometimes confuse these three operations because they all involve changing a PDF. Here is a clear breakdown of when to use each, and where to find each tool:

Use Split when: you want fewer pages

Splitting removes pages by producing a new document with only the pages you want. The original PDF is unchanged on your device. Use SammaPix PDF Split when you want to extract a page range, separate pages into individual files, or divide a long document into chunks.

Use Merge when: you want more pages from separate files

Merging combines multiple PDFs into one. If you have split out pages earlier and now need to recombine them, or if you have separate PDF documents that belong together, use SammaPix PDF Merge. This is also covered in more depth in the related article How to merge PDFs privately, no upload.

Use Redact when: you want to hide content rather than remove pages

Redacting permanently removes specific text or regions from a page without removing the page itself. If you need to share a contract but black out the pricing section, or share a bank statement with account numbers hidden, use SammaPix PDF Redact. Important: a proper PDF redact tool permanently removes the underlying text data. Simply drawing a black box on top in a PDF editor does not redact: the text remains selectable and copy-pasteable beneath the box.

Use Compress when: the PDF is too large to send

After splitting out the pages you need, you might find the resulting PDF is still large because it contains high-resolution scanned images. Use SammaPix Compress to reduce the file size before sharing. All in-browser, no upload.

Practical tips for splitting PDFs cleanly

After building and using this tool for over a year, here are the non-obvious things I have learned about splitting PDFs in practice:

Count pages before you split

When you drop a PDF into the tool, it shows you the page count. Check this before entering a range. If a bank statement says it has 12 pages but you loaded the wrong file, you want to catch that before extracting.

The PDF spec distinguishes page order from logical page numbers

Some PDFs (especially those produced by legal or financial software) use logical page numbers that differ from the physical page order. A 50-page PDF might have a cover page numbered 0, then pages numbered 1 to 49 internally, but physically those are pages 1 to 50 in the file. The PDF/ISO 32000 specification defines how page labels work. The SammaPix splitter uses physical page order (position in the document), not logical page labels. So if you want the 9th page in the file, enter 9, regardless of what page number is printed on that page.

Splitting a scanned PDF preserves the scan quality

pdf-lib extracts pages by copying the page object and its resources from the source document. It does not re-render or re-compress the content. So if you split a page from a scanned PDF, the output page has the same image quality as the source. No degradation, no re-encoding.

Annotations, forms, and bookmarks

When you extract pages, annotations (comments, highlights, signatures) attached to those pages are preserved in the output. Form fields on the extracted pages are also preserved. Document-level bookmarks that pointed to pages outside the extracted range are removed, since those pages no longer exist in the output document.

What to do if the output seems wrong

If the split produces an unexpected result, verify the page count first, check that you entered the range correctly (commas between individual pages, hyphens between start and end of a range, no spaces), and confirm that the PDF is not encrypted. Encrypted PDFs that require a user password to open cannot be read by the tool without that password.