Split a PDF without uploading it
Cut one PDF into several separate documents — by page ranges, or every N pages — and get them back as a ZIP. It runs entirely in your browser, so the file you are splitting never leaves your computer.
No sign-up. No upload. Nothing to install.
How to split a PDF
- Open your PDF. Drop the document onto PDFLight. It opens instantly, without being uploaded.
- Open the split tool. In the toolbar, open the Tools menu and choose Split.
- Choose how to cut it. Either give explicit page ranges (for example 1-3, 4-8, 9-12), or split every N pages automatically.
- Split. PDFLight builds one PDF per range and packages them into a ZIP.
- Download. The ZIP is saved straight to your disk. All of it was produced on your machine.
Why split locally
Splitting has an asymmetry that is easy to miss: you want three pages out, but a server-side splitter needs all of them in. To hand you pages 4 to 6 of a forty-page bank statement, it must first receive the other thirty-seven — including the ones you had no intention of showing anybody.
That is typically what splitting is for: a document you did not write and cannot edit at the source. A bank statement you need one page of, a scanned contract, a medical report you want to forward in part, a payslip bundle. Uploading the whole thing to extract a fraction of it is a poor trade, and an unnecessary one.
Locally, the arithmetic is different. Each range is built into its own file on your machine and packaged into a ZIP that is written straight to your disk. The pages you did not want extracted never go anywhere at all.
You can also extract rather than split: select the pages you want in the editor and use Extract to pull them out into a new document, leaving the original untouched. Splitting is the right tool when you want every page to end up somewhere; extraction when you want most of them to stay put.
Frequently asked questions
Can I split by page ranges?
Yes. Enter ranges such as 1-3, 7, 10-14 and PDFLight produces one PDF per range, delivered as a ZIP.
Can I split every N pages?
Yes. Choose the "every N pages" mode and the document is cut into equal chunks automatically.
Is my file uploaded to split it?
No. The whole operation runs in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server at any point.
How do I extract just a few pages?
Select the pages you want in the sidebar or the grid view and click Extract. It creates a new document with only those pages.
Is there a file size limit?
Only your own machine's memory. There is no server-side limit because there is no server.
Go deeper
Splitting is also the least destructive way to deal with a file that is too big to email — no image is re-encoded and no quality is lost. Related reading: