Remove Blank Pages from a PDF

ink coverage or text detection · adjustable threshold · batch

Scanners insert blank backs, exports pad to even page counts, and merged documents collect empty separators. This finds those pages by measuring how much ink is actually on them, and gives you the file back without them — listing exactly which pages went.

What counts as blank

Three things decide it, and each exists because of a case where a simpler rule fails on the documents this tool is for.

Ink is measured against the page's own paper, not against white

A scan has a tone. The paper reads as 238, or 242, or 230 — never 255. Counting every pixel darker than a fixed threshold makes a blank scanned page 100% ink, and no page is ever removed. So the paper colour is read off the page first, from a histogram of its own brightness, and ink is anything meaningfully darker than that. Ink sensitivity is how much darker: 0.08 means eight percent of the full range below the paper tone. Lower it to catch faint pencil, raise it to ignore a heavy background. The report names the paper tone whenever it is not white, so you can see which of your pages are scans.

The margins are ignored

A page with nothing on it but a page number and a header rule is not a page with content on it, but it is 0.4% ink, which clears any sensible threshold. Ignore margin excludes a band around the edge — 6% by default, roughly the outer half-inch of A4 — so furniture in the margins does not keep an otherwise blank page. Set it to 0 to measure the whole page, and raise it for documents with wide running heads.

A dark pixel needs a dark neighbour

Dust on the scanner glass produces isolated dark pixels scattered across an empty page. Requiring each one to touch another dark pixel before it counts removes speckle without removing anything real — a letterform is many adjacent dark pixels, and never one.

In the text modes, a page number is not text

No text at all and Text first, then ink used to keep any page with a single character on it, which on a paginated document is every page. Digits, whitespace and punctuation are now discounted, and Min letters sets how many actual letters a page needs before it counts as having content. The report says which rule dropped each page — no text, only a page number, or a percentage of ink.

Check before you cut

Tick Report only and nothing is written: you get the same page-by-page report with the reason for each decision, and can tune the threshold against it. Worth doing once on any document you care about, because a page removed here is removed from a copy — the original file on your disk is never touched, but the output is what you will keep.

Why ink coverage rather than "is there text"

A scanned blank page is not empty: it has speckles, a grey cast from the platen, sometimes a punch-hole shadow or a faint bleed-through from the other side. Asking "does this page contain text" fails on scans — there is never any text — and asking "is every pixel white" fails too, because almost none are. Measuring the proportion of non-white pixels handles both: a truly blank scan lands around 0.01–0.05%, and a page with a single line of text is already well above 0.2%.

The No text at all mode is the right choice for born-digital documents, where a blank page really does have no text objects, and it is much faster because nothing has to be rendered.

Picking a threshold

• 0.1% (the default) suits clean scans and digital exports.
• 0.3–0.5% for noisy scans, speckled paper, or pages with a scanner-edge shadow.
• 0.02% if a page with only a page number is being deleted and you want to keep it.
• The report lists the measured coverage for every page it removed, so one run tells you where to set the threshold for the rest of the batch.

Safety

Nothing is deleted in place — you get a new file, and the original is untouched on your disk. The report names every removed page with the reason, so you can check before replacing anything. If every page looks blank, the tool refuses and asks you to raise the threshold rather than handing back an empty document.

How to remove blank pages from a PDF

1. Drop the PDF with the empty pages in it — usually the back of every duplex-scanned sheet.
2. Pick the detection method — ink coverage works on scans (a scanned blank is never pure white); no text at all works on digital documents; text first, then ink handles a mix.
3. Set the ink threshold as a percentage of the page. 0.1–0.5% is the usual range; raise it if scanner speckle is keeping blank pages in.
4. Click Remove blank pages and read the report of exactly which page numbers were dropped.
5. Check the report before downloading. A page with only a faint logo can look blank to a threshold; if a real page was dropped, lower the threshold and run it again.

FAQ

Related tools

• Delete pages — remove specific pages by number
• Split PDF — break a file into parts
• Auto-crop margins — tidy the pages that remain
• Compress PDF — shrink the result
• PDF viewer — check the pages first