Remove Blank Pages from a PDF
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.
Drop PDF files here or click to select
One or many · a trimmed copy per file
No PDF handy? Try sample-10-pages.pdf. More free sample files.
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.
FAQ
Will it delete a page that only has a header or page number?
At the default threshold, usually not — a page number is small but well above 0.1% of the page area at 60 DPI. If it does, lower the threshold to 0.02% and re-run.
Does it work on scanned PDFs?
That is the main case it is built for. Use the ink-coverage mode, which measures pixels rather than looking for text.
Why is "check DPI" so low?
Because blankness is a coarse question. 60 DPI is enough to see whether there is any content, and it keeps a 200-page document fast. Raise it if you are hunting for a single faint mark.
What if the pages are blank but the file size does not drop much?
Blank pages are cheap; the size is in the content pages. Use Compress PDF if size is the real goal.
Is the file uploaded?
No. Rendering and rebuilding both happen in your browser.
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