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Two different halving jobs in one place. Cut a document into two files at the midpoint, or cut every page itself in two. The second is the one people usually want for scanned books: a flatbed or phone scan of an open book captures both facing pages as a single landscape sheet, and reading it is awkward until each sheet is separated into its two real pages. Both run entirely in your browser with no upload.
Splitting a PDF in half can mean two different things, and this tool does both. "Into two files" cuts the document at its midpoint, giving you the first half and the second half as separate PDFs. "Each page in two" slices every page down the middle, which is what separates a scanned book or magazine spread — two facing pages captured as one wide sheet — into individual pages.
Scanning a book almost always produces spreads: the book lies open, and one capture takes in both facing pages as a single wide sheet. That is fine for archiving and hopeless for reading, especially on a tablet or e-reader, where each sheet has to be zoomed and panned twice. Splitting every page down the middle converts the file into ordinary sequential pages that reflow properly in any reader. The order matters and is handled for you — the left half is emitted before the right, so a 200-sheet scan becomes 400 pages in the sequence the book was written in.
It is worth knowing what happens to the file when a page is halved. Each half is produced by changing the page box — the window through which the page is viewed — rather than by rendering the page to an image and cutting the image up. The practical consequences are all good ones: text stays selectable and searchable, vector artwork stays sharp at any zoom, quality is untouched, and the file does not balloon. It also means the content outside the visible half still exists in the file, so this is a layout operation, not a way to remove sensitive content — for that, use Redact PDF.
Scanning a book almost always produces spreads: the book lies open and one capture takes in both facing pages as a single wide sheet. That is fine for archiving and miserable for reading, particularly on a tablet or e-reader where every sheet has to be zoomed and panned twice. Splitting each page down the middle converts the file into ordinary sequential pages that reflow properly in any reader, and the ordering is handled for you — the left half is always emitted before the right, so the result reads in the same sequence the book was written in. Desktop tools like Briss have solved this for years; the point of doing it in a browser is that a scanned book, which is frequently under copyright or personally sensitive, never has to be uploaded anywhere.
Flatbed and phone scans are rarely square. The spine drifts off centre, the book curves away from the glass, and the two pages end up slightly different widths. A fixed 50 per cent cut then clips one page and leaves a strip of the other. The cut position slider exists for exactly this: set it against the preview so the guide line lands on the gutter rather than on text. If the drift changes through the document — common when a book was scanned in one sitting and the binding relaxed — split in batches, adjusting the position for each run, and merge the results afterwards. For pages that also need their edges tidied, run the output through Crop PDF.
It is worth understanding the mechanism, because it determines what the output is good for. Each half is produced by changing the page box rather than by rendering the page to an image and cutting the picture up. Every consequence of that is good for quality: text stays selectable and searchable, vector artwork stays sharp at any zoom, OCR still works, and the file does not balloon in size. The one consequence to be aware of is that the content outside the visible half is still present in the file. For layout work that is irrelevant; for anything where the hidden half must genuinely be gone, this is the wrong tool and Redact PDF is the right one.
Choose "Each page in two" and a vertical cut. Every wide sheet becomes two pages — left half first, then right half — so the output reads in the correct order from start to finish.
A vertical cut divides each page down the middle into a left and a right half, which is what book and magazine spreads need. A horizontal cut divides it across the middle into a top and bottom half, which suits some certificate and ticket layouts.
Yes, at the exact midpoint of each page. Scans where the spine does not sit centred will need cropping afterwards with the Crop tool.
No. Each half is a crop window over the original page, so everything is preserved — nothing is scaled, redrawn or rasterised, and text remains selectable.
It splits the document at its midpoint. A 40-page PDF becomes pages 1–20 and pages 21–40 as two separate files. With an odd page count the first half takes the extra page.
Yes — use the main Split PDF tool, where you can type an exact page range or click the pages you want.
No. Both operations run in your browser using pdf-lib.
Choose "Each page in two" with a vertical cut. Every wide sheet becomes two pages, left half first, so the output reads in the correct order from beginning to end. A 200-sheet scan becomes 400 sequential pages.
Yes — that is what the cut position slider is for. Drag it until the red guide line sits on the spine in the preview, then split. Scans done by hand or by phone are almost never perfectly centred.
No. Each half is a crop window over the original page rather than a re-render, so everything is preserved, text stays selectable and searchable, and vector artwork stays sharp at any zoom.
No, and this matters if you are handling sensitive material. Cropping changes the page box — the window through which the page is viewed — but the content outside it still exists in the file and can be recovered. This is a layout operation, not a redaction. Use Redact PDF if content must actually be removed.
"Into two files" divides the document — a 40-page PDF becomes pages 1 to 20 and 21 to 40 as two separate files. "Each page in two" divides every page itself, turning wide spreads into single pages. They solve completely different problems.
Horizontal cuts suit pages that hold two stacked items — certificates, tickets, vouchers, address labels, or forms printed two to a sheet portrait-wise.
Yes. In "Into two files" mode the slider moves the split point, and the label shows exactly which page the break falls after.
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