An empty page in the middle of a document looks careless, and in a printed copy it wastes paper. Blank pages are easy to remove once you have the PDF, and most of them can be avoided before the PDF is even made.
How to delete a blank page
- Open Delete PDF Pages and choose your file. A thumbnail of every page appears, so blank pages are easy to spot.
- Click each page you want to remove. It gets crossed out. Shift-click marks a run of pages.
- Click Delete, check the short summary (how many pages go and how many stay) and confirm.
A new copy downloads without those pages. Your original file is not changed, so if you remove the wrong page, just start again from the original.
Tip: If you want to keep only a few pages and remove most of them, click the few you want to keep and then Invert. The selection flips.
Why blank pages appear
Knowing where a blank page came from helps you stop it next time.
Double-sided scanning
When a scanner or copier scans both sides of each sheet, every one-sided page produces a blank back. A 10-page letter becomes 20 pages, half of them empty.
Fix it next time: scan one-sided, or look for a setting called something like “skip blank pages” or “blank page removal”. Many office scanners and scanning apps have one.
An empty page at the end of a Word document
Word always puts an empty paragraph after a table. If the table ends at the bottom of a page, that empty paragraph spills onto a new page, and the PDF gets a blank last page. A page break or extra empty lines at the end of the document do the same.
Fix it next time: turn on the paragraph marks (the ¶ button on the Home tab) to see what is on the empty page. Delete extra empty lines and page breaks. If the empty paragraph after a table cannot be deleted, select it and set its font size to 1.
Section breaks
A “next page” or “odd page” section break in Word can create an empty page, especially in documents set up for printing as a book. Change the break to “continuous”, or remove it.
Pages that are almost blank
Some pages are not empty but still not wanted: a fax cover sheet, “This page intentionally left blank”, a scanner test page. They are removed the same way. Look at the thumbnails carefully before you confirm, because very light pages can look blank at small size.
After removing pages
- Bookmarks that pointed to a deleted page no longer go anywhere.
- At least one page must remain: a PDF cannot be empty.
- If the pages are in the wrong order as well, split the document into parts and merge them back in the right order.
Everything happens in your browser, so the document is never uploaded. That is worth knowing when the scan contains ID cards, medical letters or bank details.