Insert Pages into a PDF
Merge appends: A, then B. This puts B inside A at the page you name — a signed page after page 3 of a contract, an appendix before the back matter, a corrected sheet in the middle of a report. Doing that with merge, split and merge again is three steps and two chances to get the page arithmetic wrong. Everything happens in your browser; the documents are never uploaded.
Drop PDF files here or click to select
The first file is the document you are inserting into · drag to reorder below
How to use it
- Drop the document you are inserting into first, then the file or files to insert. The list is drag-to-reorder, and the first row is always the base document.
- Choose the position. after page 3 means the inserted pages become pages 4 onward; before page 3 means they become page 3 and the old page 3 moves down.
- Press Insert & download. The status line reports how many pages went in, where, and the before-and-after page count — check that number, it is the cheapest verification there is.
Where the pages actually land
Two details decide whether the result is what you meant, and both are easy to get wrong by hand.
The position is resolved once, against the original page count. If you insert two files after page 3, both go after the original page 3 — the second is not pushed to after the new page 3, which would be whatever the first file put there. That sounds obvious and is exactly the bug you get from a naive loop.
The files keep the order you arranged them in. Inserting each file at the same fixed index in turn reverses them, because each one lands in front of the last. Here the insertion point advances as pages go in, so the list order on screen is the order in the output.
A page number past the end of the document is not an error — it means "the end" — but it is reported rather than silently accepted, because it usually means you were counting the wrong document.
Blank pages
Set a count and blank pages are added at the same position, after anything else being inserted. This is mostly a printing concern: duplex printing needs an even page count per section, and a chapter that should start on a right-hand page needs a blank in front of it.
By default a blank matches the size of the page it follows, which is what you want in a document that mixes A4 body pages with a landscape table. Force A4 or Letter when the source page sizes are inconsistent and you want the insert to be the correct one.
What is preserved, and what is not
Page content, vector text, images and page size all come across exactly — the pages are copied as objects, not rasterised, so nothing is re-compressed and no quality is lost.
Annotations that live on a page travel with it. Document-level structure does not: bookmarks, form-field relationships and links pointing at a page by index belong to the base document's catalogue, and inserting pages in the middle changes what those indexes mean. Expect an outline to need rebuilding after a mid-document insert. If the base file is a form you intend to keep fillable, fill it first and insert afterwards.
FAQ
How is this different from Merge PDFs?
Merge concatenates whole documents end to end, which is the right tool when order is all that matters. This one has a target: it opens one document and puts pages inside it at a position. If you find yourself merging, then splitting, then merging again, this is the tool you wanted.
Can I replace a page rather than insert next to one?
In two passes: insert the new page after the old one here, then remove the old one with Delete pages. Doing it in that order means you can see the new page in place before removing anything, which is the safer sequence.
Does it work on a password-protected PDF?
An owner-password file that merely restricts editing is read anyway. A file encrypted with a user password cannot be opened without it — remove it first with Unlock, which needs the password you already know.
Is anything uploaded?
No. Both documents are read and rewritten in your browser by pdf-lib. See the privacy policy.