Split by bookmark
Cut a document at its own chapter boundaries.
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your file is never uploaded, and you can verify that in your browser's network tab. Verify it yourself: open your browser's network tab and watch. You will see one small request asking whether you have tasks left - a tool name and a hash, never the file.
What this does
This uses the document's own outline to decide where to cut. For anything with a table of contents that is far more useful than splitting every N pages, because the document already knows where its sections begin.
Use it on reports, manuals, statutes, textbooks and scanned books with an outline - anywhere someone needs the chapters as separate files, whether to distribute them individually, to file them separately, or to work on one at a time.
How it works
- Drop the PDF onto this page. The tool reads its outline.
- Choose which outline level to cut at. Level 1 gives you top-level chapters; level 2 also splits their subsections.
- Decide whether output files should be named after their bookmarks.
- Choose whether to keep the pages before the first bookmark as a separate front-matter file.
- Press Split by bookmark and download the files individually or as a ZIP.
A section runs from its bookmark to the next bookmark at the same or a shallower level, not to the next bookmark of any depth. That distinction is what makes level 1 give you whole chapters including their subsections, rather than cutting every time a sub-heading appears.
Pages before the first bookmark belong to no section. Title pages, copyright notices and tables of contents usually live there, and dropping them silently would be a strange thing to do, so by default they become their own front-matter file. You can discard them instead.
Naming files after their bookmarks makes the output immediately usable, and the names are cleaned of characters that Windows and macOS reject in file names. Each is prefixed with a zero-padded number so the chapters stay in order in the file listing.
If the document has no outline at all, the tool says so and points you at Split PDF instead, rather than producing a single file and letting you wonder what happened.
Questions people ask
- My PDF has no bookmarks. What can I do?
- This tool cannot help, and it will tell you so rather than failing quietly. Use Split PDF to cut by page range instead, or add bookmarks first with Edit bookmarks and then come back.
- What does the level setting do?
- It decides how deep to cut. Level 1 splits only at top-level bookmarks, so each chapter stays whole with its subsections inside. Level 2 also splits at second-level bookmarks, giving you a file per subsection. The deeper you go, the more files you get.
- How are the files named?
- By default each file is numbered and named after its bookmark, so 01-Introduction.pdf, 02-Method.pdf and so on. Characters that file systems reject are removed. Turn the naming option off to use the original file name with a number instead.
- What happens to the title page?
- Anything before the first bookmark becomes a separate front-matter file by default, so it is not lost. Switch the front-matter option to discard if you do not want it.