BASALT · JOURNAL
How to delete pages from a PDF on a Mac
Removing pages is one of the few PDF operations macOS handles well out of the box, so start there before installing anything.
In Preview, at no cost
Open the document, show the sidebar with View then Thumbnails, select the pages you want gone, and press Delete. Then File, Save.
That is the whole procedure. It works on most documents and is the right answer for most people.
From the command line
qpdf removes pages without rendering anything, which makes it fast on very large files:
qpdf input.pdf --pages . 1-4,8-20 -- output.pdfThat keeps pages 1 to 4 and 8 to 20, dropping the rest. Note the syntax describes what to keep rather than what to remove, which is easy to get backwards.
The thing worth checking afterwards
Deleting a page removes it from the page tree. It does not necessarily remove the underlying content from the file, particularly if the application saves incrementally rather than rewriting the document.
If the pages you removed were sensitive, that distinction matters. Check by counting end of file markers:
grep -c "%%EOF" output.pdfMore than one means the file contains earlier revisions and the removed pages may still be recoverable from them. A document that has had pages removed for confidentiality reasons should be written as a single generation.
When a page is not really a page
Some documents carry content that is not on any page at all: attachments, metadata, and hidden layers. Deleting pages does nothing to those. If your reason for removing a page was to remove information rather than to shorten the document, that is a different operation.
Frequently asked questions
How do I delete a page from a PDF on Mac for free?
Open it in Preview, show thumbnails with View then Thumbnails, select the pages and press Delete, then save. That covers most documents at no cost.
How do I remove pages from a very large PDF?
Use qpdf from the command line: qpdf input.pdf --pages . 1-4,8-20 -- output.pdf. It works on the file structure without rendering, so it is fast even on files too large to open comfortably.
Does deleting a page remove its content from the file?
Not necessarily. The page is removed from the page tree, but if the file was saved incrementally the earlier revision containing that page may remain. Count %%EOF markers: more than one means earlier revisions are present.
How do I check that removed pages are really gone?
Count end of file markers with grep -c "%%EOF" on the output. A document written as a single generation has one. If confidentiality was the reason for removal, also check metadata and attachments, which page deletion does not touch.
Doing it in Basalt
Basalt is a native macOS PDF toolkit: eighteen tools in one window covering merge, split, page organisation, compression, OCR, passwords, Bates numbering, forms, signing, watermarks and comparison. Every file is processed on your Mac, and the engine that opens documents holds no network entitlement at all, which macOS enforces at the code-signature level. Redaction destroys content rather than covering it, and an independent verifier proves the material is gone before a file is written. A one time $29 licence covers up to three Macs, free for the first 24 hours. Get it at basaltformac.com, or brew install --cask chipmunk1101/tap/basalt.
Redaction that proves itself
Basalt destroys the content you mark, then re-opens the file it wrote and proves the content is gone before it saves anything. Your documents never leave your Mac.