🧰 How to Reduce PDF Size, Extract Pages, Combine Files, and Save as Images
(Article 2 in the series “How to Work With PDF Files”)
Introduction
PDF files are everywhere — manuals, invoices, forms, and technical documents. But working with them isn’t always easy. In this article, we’ll show you how to:
- reduce the file size of a PDF
- extract one or more pages
- combine multiple PDFs into one
- save a PDF page as an image
All without expensive software or risky online tools.
1) How to Reduce PDF File Size
Large PDFs can be hard to send by email or upload to websites. Here’s how to shrink them safely.
🛠 Offline Tools
- PDFsam Basic – official download page
- LibreOffice (including LibreOffice Draw)
- SumatraPDF – free PDF reader for Windows
- Xodo PDF Reader & Editor
🛠 Online Tools
- iLovePDF – online tools for merging, splitting, compressing and converting PDFs
- Smallpdf – simple and user‑friendly PDF tools
- PDF2Go – edit, compress, convert and repair PDF files
- Sejda – powerful online PDF editor (free for small tasks)
💡 Tips
- If the PDF is scanned (image-based), compression is limited
- Avoid online tools unless you trust the site
- Re-saving a PDF with lower DPI can reduce size significantly
2) How to Extract a Page From a PDF
Sometimes you only need one page — a diagram, a table, or a specific section.
🛠 How to Do It
- Open the PDF in Edge, Adobe Reader, or PDFsam
- Choose “Print” → select “Microsoft Print to PDF”
- In the page range, enter the page number(s) you want
- Save the output as a new PDF
💡 Bonus
- You can also extract pages using LibreOffice Draw or Preview on macOS
- For scanned PDFs, use a screenshot tool to save the page as an image
3) How to Combine Multiple PDFs Into One
Perfect for merging manuals, chapters, or related documents.
🛠 Recommended Tool
- PDFsam Basic
- Drag and drop files
- Choose order
- Click “Merge” → done
💡 Alternatives
- Adobe Acrobat (paid)
- Online tools (use only if the content isn’t sensitive)
4) How to Save a PDF Page as an Image
Useful when you want to insert a page into a presentation or share it as a picture.
🛠 Methods
- Open the PDF → take a screenshot
- Use PDF to PNG converters (offline preferred)
- In LibreOffice Draw, export the page as an image
💡 Tips
- PNG is better for diagrams, JPG for photos
- Watch out for resolution — some tools export low quality by default
Summary
These four tasks — shrinking, extracting, merging, and converting — cover 90% of what users need when working with PDFs. In the next article, we’ll go deeper: translating PDFs, extracting images and tables, and editing scanned documents.
Coming Next
Article 3: Advanced PDF Work — Translation, Image Extraction, OCR, Editing, and Safe Tools