Delete PDF pages without losing bookmarks and links

Delete pages, step by step

Our 48-page test report has 10 bookmarks (6 chapters and 4 sections) and a contents page with links to each chapter. Chapter 2, “Market”, runs from page 9 to 12 and has to go.

1. Drop the PDF on Delete pages above. The hint under Pages shows the file’s page count.
2. In Pages, type 9-12. Lists work too: 2, 9-12, 47-.
3. Press Delete pages.
4. Download report-without-9-12.pdf. The result reads “Removed 4 pages; metadata, forms and the other bookmarks kept” and “Took out 3 bookmarks that pointed at a removed page”.

The new file has 44 pages. Your original stays as it was.

What happens to the bookmarks?

Delete pages works on the document itself rather than copying pages into a new one, so the outline, the metadata and the form fields come along. Then it tidies the outline:

• Bookmarks after the cut still land right. A bookmark points at a page, not at a page number, so “3. Results” now opens page 9, which is the same page that used to be page 13.
• Bookmarks to removed pages are taken out. “2.1 Customers” and “2.2 Prices” are gone, so the panel never offers a jump to nothing.
• A whole chapter goes as a whole. Delete “2. Market” and all its section pages, and its bookmark leaves the outline with its sections. Delete only the chapter’s first page and keep some sections, and “2. Market” stays as a heading over the sections that are left; it no longer opens a page itself.

How to spot a tool that got it wrong

Some tools copy the pages into a new file and leave the old outline behind, or keep bookmarks pointing at whatever page now has the old number. To check any result, open it in a reader with a bookmarks panel, click 3 bookmarks after the cut and see whether the page that opens matches the title. Inspect lists the outline’s top-level titles, which shows at a glance whether there is an outline at all.

Do links and the table of contents still work?

We checked the 8 links in our test report after deleting pages 9 to 12:

• Links to pages that remain keep working. The contents link to “Results” lands on the new page 9; a link on page 5 to a table on old page 20 lands on the new page 16.
• A link to a deleted page is taken out. The contents link to “Market” is gone from the contents page, so clicking there does nothing; the printed word “Market” stays, because it is text on the page.
• The printed contents do not renumber. A contents line such as “Results, page 13” is text printed on the page. It still says 13 after the cut, because no tool can know that this ink is a page reference. The same goes for printed page numbers at the foot of each page: they are part of the page and keep their old values. Restamp them with Add page numbers; the guide to numbering that skips the cover has the settings.

Does the file get smaller?

Yes. Delete pages takes the removed pages out of the file, not only out of the page list: their text and pictures go, and so do the links that opened them and the form fields that sat only on them. Our 48-page test report has pictures on pages 9 to 12; deleting those 4 pages took it from about 850 KB to 12 KB. A deleted page of plain text saves a few kilobytes at most, because text was never the weight.

The file’s metadata stays as it was (title, author, dates). If that also has to go, run the result through Remove metadata afterwards.

The editor’s page rail deletes pages too (open the page’s menu, Delete page), and its save leaves no content from deleted pages behind. But it does not tidy bookmarks: in our test, bookmarks to the deleted pages stayed in the outline, pointing nowhere. For a structured document, Delete pages gives the cleaner result.

Delete 4 pages or extract 44?

Both get you a file without chapter 2:

	Delete pages 9-12	Extract pages 1-8, 13-
Bookmarks	Kept and tidied	The ones to the pages taken
Links between pages	Keep working; links to deleted pages go	Keep working between pages taken
Form fields	Kept, except those only on deleted pages	Those on the pages taken
Title and author	Kept, with all other metadata	Title, author, subject and keywords only
Best for	Reports, manuals, forms	Excerpts to send

Both leave the removed pages’ content out of the file. Type whichever list is shorter; delete when the file’s other metadata should stay exactly as it was. Sending only some pages covers the extract side.

What deleting does not do

Deleting is not redaction. It removes whole pages; anything sensitive on the pages you keep is still there. For a name or number on a page you keep, redact it properly.

It does not renumber anything printed on the pages, as shown above, and it will not delete every page of a file (a PDF needs at least 1). It cannot open a file whose password you do not have. For more ways to rearrange a file, see the guide to organising PDF pages, and for everything that protects a file you share, the PDF privacy guide.