When to split a PDF
- Send only what’s needed — share one chapter or a single signed page instead of the whole document.
- Upload limits — break a large scan into smaller files that fit portal size limits.
- Organise — separate a combined scan into individual documents.
How splitting works
The page ranges you enter are checked against the document’s page count, then the selected pages are copied into new PDF files with pdf-lib. If you choose “Every page”, one file is created per page.
What is a PDF file?
PDF (Portable Document Format) was created by Adobe and is now an open ISO standard (ISO 32000). A PDF fixes the exact layout of every page — fonts, images and positions — so a document looks the same on every screen and printer. That makes it the standard for contracts, invoices, manuals, papers and forms.
Inside, a PDF stores each page as drawing instructions. Text written by a program is stored as real characters (a “text layer”) and can be selected and extracted. Scanned documents usually store only a picture of each page, so their text cannot be extracted without OCR.