Almost every collected PDF carries a few pages nobody needs: the blank back of a title sheet, a duplicate scan, a cover page from a merge. The opposite problem exists too — sometimes one page, such as a form or a separator sheet, needs to appear several times. PDF Arranger’s delete and duplicate actions handle both in seconds.
As with every PDF Arranger edit, deleting a page only removes it from the arrangement in the window. Your original file keeps all of its pages until you deliberately export over a new file, so there is no risk in tidying aggressively.
Before you start
You need PDF Arranger 1.14.0 (or a recent version) installed. If it is not on your computer yet, download PDF Arranger first — it is free, open source (GPL-3.0), and works entirely offline, so your files never leave your computer.
Nothing you do in PDF Arranger changes the original file on disk. Every edit only takes effect when you export the result to a new PDF, which makes experimenting safe: if the output is not what you wanted, adjust the arrangement and export again.
Step by step: delete pages
- Open the PDF and find the page or pages to remove by their thumbnails.
- Select the pages. Select a single page, a continuous range, or several separate pages. The selection tools can also pick all odd or all even pages, which is handy for removing scanner separator sheets.
- Delete the selection. The pages disappear from the arrangement and the remaining pages close up in order.
- Scan through the document once to confirm nothing wanted was caught in the selection, then export the cleaned document.
Step by step: duplicate a page
- Select the page you want more copies of.
- Apply Duplicate. A copy of the page is added to the arrangement; duplicate again if you need several copies.
- Drag the copies into position if they are needed in different places — for example a form page repeated before each section.
- Export the finished document.
Tips
- Deleted the wrong page? Use Undo rather than starting over; the page returns to its old position.
- Deleting pages is also the fastest way to split a document informally: delete everything except one section, export, then undo and repeat for the next section — though the dedicated split workflow is cleaner for many parts.
- Duplicating is page-level copying: the copy is identical, and editing the content of one copy independently is not something PDF Arranger does.
Tidy first, export once
Page cleanup is most efficient as a single pass before you export anything else. Open the document, walk through the thumbnails from first to last, and delete as you go: blank backs, scanner test pages, the duplicate of page 12 where the feeder hiccuped. If a section needs a separator, duplicate an existing divider page and drag the copy into place during the same pass. Only when the thumbnail strip shows exactly the document you want — no more, no less — do you export. Working this way means one export produces the final file, instead of a chain of half-cleaned versions with names like final, final2, and final-really. It also makes the check easy: the page count in the window should match the count you expect before you save.
One last habit worth building: after exporting the cleaned file, keep the original somewhere separate for a while. Page removal is easy to redo from the original, but impossible to undo from the exported file alone.
Related guides
Keep going with these step-by-step guides from the same series: