Any way to remove blank pages from PDF?

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This may be an impossibility but I’ll ask anyway in case anyone may have a suggestion.

Background: My office is moving to smaller location with less storage space and I want to get rid of a large stack of paper documents. These are accounting posting reports for a number of years. It’s 99.9% likely no one will ever look anything up in them again but I just can’t throw them out because of legal audit trail requirements. We do have a large office multifunction machine and my thoughts were to just stack them in the machine and let its scanner automatically convert them all to PDF files which I can store on disks taking up no storage space. However originally to save paper, we printed many of the reports double sided which means I have to scan everything double sided resulting in numerous blank pages scattered throughout the PDF files.

Question: While the blank pages aren’t a huge problem since they’re probably only dead files anyway, it would create larger than necessary files and being the “neat freak” that I am, I was wondering if there was any free software that can read a PDF and automatically strip out blank pages to re-save as smaller neater files. (Too time consuming to go through hundreds of pages one by one to do it manually if I had software that could open it and do that.) My assumption is probably no but can’t hurt to ask. (And no, I don’t have any other real PDF software such as Adobe Acrobat that can edit a PDF … I just use free CutePDF when I need to create a PDF directly on my computer.)

Rod Corkum

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PDFill a free utility will delete pages via item 2,as shown in the screenshot.
42559-pdffill
It can be downloaded from http://www.pdfill.com/ go to Free PDF tools on the left column.

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There’s a $40 option to do it automatically: Axpertsoft PDF Page Remover

But would blank pages make a significant difference to disk storage requirements? My guess is no.

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But would blank pages make a significant difference to disk storage requirements? My guess is no.

I’d second that – pdf is a pretty efficient format, although as the pages will (presumably) be saved as graphic images, significant ‘snow’ on blank pages will take some storage space. You are likely to achieve more by spending tme on reducing the scanner resolution as low as you can go (and scan in grey-scale also, unless you need colour). Also look into what image compression choices (if any) the scanner offers. Some experiments are called for…

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Thanks all. Looks like PDFill requires manually selecting the pages to be removed so that would be too much work, however Axpertsoft looks like a solution if I need to go there. I’m far from an expert here so was just assuming that a lot of blank pages would increase file size but if no significant effect, then there’s probably no need to bother to remove them. I’ll do a test run with a small “stack” of pages – one with all text pages and a second with half of them blanks to see if there’s any difference. The documents are all just text so scanning will be in the default black and white, no color required.

I will however keep PDFill in mind – I might have some other uses for that.

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Thanks all. Looks like PDFill requires manually selecting the pages to be removed so that would be too much work,

If the blank pages are uniformly spaced, PDFill can automatically delete all odd or even pages as applicable.

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If the blank pages are uniformly spaced, PDFill can automatically delete all odd or even pages as applicable.

No, they are scattered all over the place. Could be anywhere from one to ten pages of text between blanks.

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… The documents are all just text so scanning will be in the default black and white, no color required…

The scanner may not know (or care) about this, so its worth checking it isn’t using colour unnecessarily.

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The scanner may not know (or care) about this, so its worth checking it isn’t using colour unnecessarily.

Thanks, but no, it’s a big Sharp multifunction copier/printer/scanner/fax and scanner default is B&W. You have to tell it if you want color.

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I agree with BruceR and mngerhold–you’re probably making a mountain out of molehill. I’d just leave the blank pages in the pdfs.

I suggest you try an experiment. Find a suitable sample of one of your documents that would contain a typical proportion of blank pages. Do two scans, one with the blank pages and one without, then compare the sizes of the two pdfs. I think you’ll find that leaving the blank pages in only adds about 2-3 KB per page. That’s probably not worth your time to bother trying to remove them.

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dg1261 – Yes, that’s pretty much the conclusion I came to – see post #5.

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Do two scans, one with the blank pages and one without, then compare the sizes of the two pdfs. I think you’ll find that leaving the blank pages in only adds about 2-3 KB per page. That’s probably not worth your time to bother trying to remove them.

I did try the experiment – 50 single sided sheets of text scanned one side, then tried 25 of the same sheets scanned double sided to give 50 pages of which half were blank. The second result was much smaller file than the first so confirmed that the blanks were barely registering in the file size. So yes, no point in bothering to remove them. Case closed.

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I used Foxit PDF Editor to do this. Simply open pdf files with this editor and delete any page of your choice.

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I used Foxit PDF Editor to do this. Simply open pdf files with this editor and delete any page of your choice.

Thanks for the response but I think you missed the comment in my first post (middle of second paragraph) that it was too time consuming to try to delete blank pages manually as there will be hundreds of pages to go through. However I’ve seen various posts in the forum talking about Foxit so I should look into it for other uses.

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