How to remove blank pages from a PDF
Blank pages creep into PDFs in two common ways. A scanner reads the empty back of every sheet, or two documents are merged and one of them ends on an odd page. The result is a file that is longer than it should be, with white pages that confuse readers and waste printing paper.
Removing them is easy. The one rule is to look before you delete, because a page that looks empty is sometimes not.
Remove blank pages in four steps
- Open the Remove pages tool.
- Add your PDF and wait for the page thumbnails.
- Click each blank page to mark it. Look at the thumbnail first.
- Press Remove pages and download the result.
In a test on a 12-page document with four blank pages in it, the result was an 8-page file. The file went from 10.2 KB to 6.5 KB.
Pages that look blank but are not
- A page with only a faint watermark or a light-grey table.
- A page with a small page number or footer at the bottom.
- A page that is intentionally empty, such as "This page left blank" in a printed manual.
- A page with white text on a white background, which can be intentional in a form.
Zoom in on a thumbnail if you are unsure. If a page has a page number, check whether removing it leaves a gap in the numbering. You can renumber later with Add page numbers.
Prevent blank pages in the first place
- When you scan two-sided documents, turn off the "scan both sides" option for pages that are only printed on one side.
- Before you merge files, look at the last page of each. A stray blank page often hides there.
- If you convert photos to PDF, remove any empty shot of the table or floor.
When you have a lot of blank pages
For a long scan with a blank page after every sheet, tick them in order. If they alternate, for example every second page, the page numbers are 2, 4, 6 and so on. In the tool you click them one by one, so a 100-page file takes a minute of clicking. That is still faster than redoing the scan.
After removing
- Run Compress PDF if the file is still too large.
- Rotate any sideways pages with Rotate PDF.
- Re-number the pages if the document is going to be printed.