Split a PDF in half

Cutting a document in two is the simplest thing anyone asks of a PDF and among the most tedious to do by hand: work out the middle, type two page ranges, run the tool twice, keep track of which file is which. This does it in one step and hands back both halves together.

Where the cut falls

The document is divided once, at the middle. An even number of pages gives two equal halves. An odd number puts the extra page in the first half, which is what somebody splitting a bundle in two expects: pages 1 to 13 and 14 to 25, rather than a twelve and a thirteen decided by which way the arithmetic happened to round.

Both parts come back in a single ZIP, named in order. That matters more than it sounds. Two separate downloads is two chances to lose one, and a browser that names them both after the original leaves you two files you have to open to tell apart.

Nothing is re-rendered

Each half is built by copying the original pages into a new document. Text stays selectable and searchable, images are not re-encoded, vector artwork stays sharp, and the two halves together are about the size of the original. Nothing is rasterized and no quality is lost.

Form fields and annotations that belong to a page travel with it. A document-wide table of contents will point at pages that are no longer in the same file, which is unavoidable when one document becomes two.

When a different split is the right one

If you need parts under a size limit, splitting by size measures each part after building it. If the document has chapters, splitting on its bookmarks follows the structure the author gave it. If you already know the page numbers, the page-range splitter takes them directly.

Half is the right tool when the document has no structure to follow and the only thing you want is two roughly equal pieces: a scanned bundle, a long export, a merged file you want to hand to two people.

Nothing leaves the device

The document is opened, copied and packed by a worker inside your browser. There is no upload, no account, and no server copy, and the original file on your disk is untouched.