Removing pages, and what stays behind
Deleting copies every page except the ones you name into a new document. Nothing is re-encoded, so the pages you keep are byte-for-byte what they were, and the file shrinks by roughly the weight of what you removed.
It is worth being clear about what deletion is not: the removed pages are gone from the copy you download, not redacted from the original. If you are removing a page because it contains something sensitive, delete it here and then destroy the original — otherwise you still have the sensitive file.
- Numbering shifts
- Delete page 3 of ten and the old page 4 becomes page 3. Anything that referenced page numbers — a contents page, a cross-reference — now points to the wrong place.
- Internal links may break
- A link that pointed at a deleted page has nowhere to go. Links between pages you kept continue to work.