How to Split a PDF on Mac (Free, No Adobe)

Your Mac holds a 24-page PDF and you need to hand one colleague the first five pages and another the rest — or you just want to pull a single page out of a big document. Splitting is the least obvious PDF task on macOS: Preview can do it, but the process is manual and easy to get wrong. There is a browser route that is simpler and safer.

Here is how to split a PDF on a Mac — what Preview can and cannot do, and the one-step browser method.

What Preview can and cannot do

Preview has no "split" command. The workaround is to open the PDF, delete every page you do not want, and save what is left as a new file. That works, but it has real limits:

• You must duplicate the file first, or you risk editing the original by accident
• Each output file is one filtered selection, so a multi-part split means repeating the whole delete-and-save routine
• It is easy to save a half-deleted file if you forget to duplicate before you start

Split a PDF on your Mac in the browser

1. 1Open the Split PDF tool in Safari or Chrome on your Mac.
2. 2Drag your PDF from Finder into the tool, or click to browse and select it.
3. 3Enter the pages for the new file — a single page (9), a range (1-5), or a mixture (1-3, 5, 7-10).
4. 4Review the preview to confirm exactly those pages are selected.
5. 5Click Split and download the new PDF.

The original file is never modified, so you can run the tool again with different ranges and build as many separate documents as you need — pages 1-5 saved as "Part 1", pages 6-24 as "Part 2", and so on.

Extracting a single page or a few pages

To pull one page out of a long document — say page 9 of a 50-page report — enter that single number and you get a one-page PDF ready to email. The output keeps the original page content as real text, so quality stays identical and the extracted pages remain selectable and searchable.

How the Preview manual method compares

If you prefer to stay in Preview: open the PDF, choose View > Thumbnails, duplicate the file first, select the unwanted thumbnails and press Delete, then use File > Export to save what remains under a clear name. The browser approach does the same job with less risk of saving a half-deleted file, especially when you split on several ranges.

After you split

Name each output file clearly when you download it, and flip through it once to confirm the pages are the ones you meant. If you later need the separate parts back together, you can merge PDFs on the same Mac in a single step.