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Home/Merge PDFs/Page ranges

Merge PDFs, taking only the pages you need

Most merges aren’t one file appended to another. They’re a signature page from one document, three pages from a report, and an appendix from somewhere else, assembled in an order that exists only for this one recipient.

Drop the PDFs you want to merge

or choose a file · pick several at once · or paste with Ctrl+V

Drop them in any order; you can reorder once they're in.

Each file carries its own range

Every file in the list has its own range box. Leave it empty and the whole document goes in. Type a range and only those pages are copied.

The syntax accepts commas, spaces around the dash, and an open end.

3
Page 3 only.
2-5
Pages 2 through 5.
1,4,9
Those three pages, in that order.
7-
Page 7 to the end of that file. Useful when you don’t know the page count.
-4
The first four pages.
left blank
The whole file.
The total is counted for you. The panel shows the expected page count after merging, updating as you change ranges. If a range names a page the file doesn’t have, it’s clamped rather than silently dropped, so the count is a real total and not an estimate.

The order you drag is the order in the file

Drop files in any order and rearrange them afterwards. Drag a row, or use the arrow buttons, which also work on a touch screen where dragging a list is unreliable.

This matters more than it sounds. Assembling a submission package usually means putting a cover sheet first, and the cover sheet is the thing you think of last.

A page range is a copy, not a move

Taking pages 2–5 out of a contract doesn’t remove them from the contract. The source file is read and five of its pages are copied into the new document. Nothing is written back to anything you opened.

That’s worth knowing, because it means the same file can appear twice in the merge with different ranges, and both copies are honored.

What stops a merge

A PDF with an open password can’t be merged. Copying pages out of it requires decrypting it first, and that needs the password. The file is flagged in red the moment you drop it in, before you’ve spent time arranging anything.

The route out is to unlock it first: enter the password you already have, export a plain copy, and merge that. Check first with the metadata tool if you’re unsure which kind of protection a file carries.

Merging doesn’t repair anything. If a file is damaged enough that a reader won’t open it, merging won’t open it either. Both tools use the same strict parser, so a file that fails there fails here.

What the output keeps and what it loses

Pages are copied through as they were, so text layer, fonts, vector art and page size all survive. A page that was A4 stays A4 next to one that was Letter, because the merger doesn’t normalize sizes.

Document metadata isn’t carried over. The merged file is written without the title, author and producer fields of any of its sources, which is usually what you want on something assembled from several places.

Page content
Copied as-is. Text stays selectable and searchable.
Page size
Left alone. Mixed sizes are allowed and stay mixed.
Bookmarks and outlines
Not carried across. The merge produces a flat sequence of pages.
Form fields
Preserved on the pages that have them, with their original field names.
Document metadata
Removed. No source title or author travels into the output.

Straight answers

Can I merge a file that asks for a password?

Not directly. Decrypting it requires the password, so unlock it first and merge the plain copy. A file with only an owner password merges without any of this, because its content was never encrypted.

Do the pages get reordered if the files have different page sizes?

No, and they aren’t resized either. Each page keeps its own dimensions. If the result needs to be uniform, that’s a separate job. Crop changes the page box, and it changes it one document at a time.

Is there a limit on how many files?

No fixed one. The real limit is how much memory the tab is given, and a few hundred megabytes is normally fine. For a very large merge, do it in batches and merge the batches.

Will the merged file still be searchable?

On the pages that were searchable to begin with, yes. Text is copied through untouched. A scanned page stays an image, exactly as it was in the source.

Can I merge just the first page of fifty files?

Yes, and this is the fastest way to build a contact sheet of cover pages. Add them all, set each range to 1, and reorder before exporting. Each file still has to be opened, so it takes a moment per file.

More on merge pdfs

Attach a signed page to the contract it belongs to

The contract came back signed on a separate sheet, or you have an annex that lives in its own file.

The full tool, with every option: Merge PDFs.