There are several reasons to break up a PDF: pulling your own chapter out of a 100-page deck, separating a duplex scan that landed as one file, or sending a different page range to each recipient. The problem is that "split" means different things in different tools — by range, into equal parts, or one page per file — and you usually find out which one you got after the fact.
OFFiler exposes those three as explicit modes. All of them run entirely in the browser, and the resulting files come back as a single ZIP. Below: how each mode is specified, what it produces, how outputs are named, and when to reach for extraction instead.
The three split modes
Page ranges: build arbitrary chunks with commas
Typing "1-3, 5, 7-9" produces three PDFs: pages 1–3, page 5 on its own, and pages 7–9. Each comma-separated segment maps to exactly one output file. Hyphens give ranges, bare numbers give single pages, and page numbers are 1-based — the same numbers you see on screen.
If a range exceeds the document's page count, or the start comes after the end, you are told before any processing begins, so you never discover the mistake after the split.
Every N pages / one page per file
"Every N pages" walks the document from the front and cuts it into chunks of N. A 20-page PDF split every 3 pages yields six three-page files plus one file holding the remaining two. "One page per file" produces as many PDFs as there are pages. Neither requires you to count pages and write ranges out, so they are faster when you just want a mechanical cut.
Outputs are zero-padded and zipped
Outputs are named part_01.pdf, part_02.pdf and so on. The padding width grows with the number of chunks, so even a split into more than a hundred files sorts correctly as part_001.pdf. Everything is bundled into a ZIP for a single download, and that ZIP is also built in the browser.
Split vs. extract, and other caveats
If you want one file, extract instead
Splitting is for producing multiple files. If you only need pages 10–15 out of 50, the result you want is a single file, and extraction gets you there with fewer steps. Specifying a single range in the split tool works too, but leaves you unzipping an archive for one PDF.
Bookmarks are dropped; many chunks take time
Each output is assembled as a new document, so bookmarks and document metadata are not carried over. Page content itself is not re-encoded, so image quality and text selectability are unchanged from the original.
The split also re-reads the source PDF once per chunk and writes each output separately. Asking for one file per page across several hundred pages will take a noticeable amount of time on a modest device. Password-protected PDFs cannot be loaded — remove the protection first.
What to chain afterwards
Split, reorder, re-combine
When several scanned documents arrived as one file, the usual flow is: split them apart, drop the blank separator pages, then merge back only what you need. Each step's result can be handed to the next tool without saving and re-opening files in between.
Specs and limits
- Input format
- PDF (application/pdf)
- Size limit
- 100 MB per file
- Modes
- Page ranges / every N pages / one page per file
- Range syntax
- 1-based. e.g. "1-3, 5, 7-9" → 3 files
- Output naming
- Zero-padded sequence, part_01.pdf
- Download
- Bundled into a single ZIP
- Not carried over
- Bookmarks, document metadata
- Network
- No file upload; all processing in-browser