remove-pages

Remove Pages from PDF

Produce a new PDF with the specified pages removed.

Inputs

• Input PDF path (required).
• Pages to remove (required) — flexible:
  • Single: 5
  • Range: 5-7
  • List: 1,3,5,7
  • Mixed: 1,3-5,12,20-end
  • Special: blank (auto-detect blank pages), last, first
• Output path (optional) — defaults to <input>-trimmed.pdf.

Tooling

qpdf is the cleanest option — it supports inverse selection natively. pdftk and mutool are alternatives.

qpdf — keep all pages except 5

qpdf --empty --pages input.pdf 1-4,6-z -- output.pdf

The trick: qpdf can't directly remove pages, but it can select the pages you want to keep. Compute the inverse of the user's removal list against the page count.

Page count

pdfinfo input.pdf | awk '/^Pages:/ {print $2}'

Blank-page detection

For blank mode, render each page to a low-res PNG and check whether the image is essentially uniform white:

gs -sDEVICE=png16m -r50 -o /tmp/p%d.png input.pdf
# then for each PNG, use ImageMagick: identify -format "%[mean]" /tmp/p1.png
# values close to 65535 (16-bit max) ≈ blank

Workflow

1. Get total page count.
2. Parse the user's removal spec into a sorted page list.
3. Compute the keep-list as its inverse.
4. Run qpdf with the keep-list.
5. Verify: pdfinfo output.pdf | grep Pages and confirm new count = old - removed.

Output

Trimmed PDF at the requested path. Original is preserved.