Three ways to mark pages
Click a page, or tick its checkbox, to mark it. Hold Shift and click another page to mark everything between them, which is the quick way to drop a whole chapter. Each page also has a small cross button that marks it, and the same button brings it back.
Type the pages in the box. Write single pages and ranges separated by commas, like 2, 5-8, 12-, where 12- means page 12 to the end. last, odd and even work too. If something is wrong the box says what it did not understand, and the grid keeps its previous marks until the text is fixed.
Quick buttons mark many pages at once: Odd pages, Even pages, Invert and Clear. Invert is the shortcut when you know which few pages you want to keep. Mark those, press Invert, and everything else is marked instead.
The box and the grid always show the same choice. Mark a page and the box is rewritten, for example from 2, 5-6 to 2, 5-7. Type in the box and the grid follows.
Checking before you save
Marked pages stay in the grid, pale and labelled Removed, so you can still see what you are about to lose. The box under Result counts the pages that will stay and lists the ones you removed. If you mark every page, the tool tells you so and keeps the button off, because a PDF with no pages is not a PDF.
After you press Remove, the new file is opened again and its pages are counted, so you are never offered a file with the wrong number of pages. The preview shows every page that stayed under its new number and the number it had before, such as Page 3 · was 4. If a page is missing or an old one is still there, you can see it and go back with Change pages without starting again.
Your original file is only read. It is never changed, and the new file is a separate download, so you can always try again from the original.
Delete, extract or split?
Use this tool when you want most of the document and need to lose a few pages: a cover sheet, a blank page, a page of notes. When you want only a few pages and to drop the rest, the tool for extracting PDF pages is faster, because you tick what you want instead. And when you want several files, such as one per chapter, use the PDF splitter.
The pages that stay are copied, not redrawn: text stays text you can select and search, photos keep their quality, and pages of different sizes or orientations stay as they were. A few things that belong to the whole document are not carried into the new file, namely bookmarks, links that jump to another page, the form in a fillable PDF, and the title and author of the original. The page about removing pages from a PDF goes into what that means for page numbers and for sharing the result.
Scans, big files and protected files
A scanned PDF stores each page as a picture, and removing pages simply leaves those pictures out. The new file is about as big as the pages that stay. A scan has no text layer, and ClipLime does not recognise text in pictures.
Everything happens in your browser, so the limit is your device's memory. Long documents stay usable because thumbnails are drawn only for the pages near the screen. ClipLime warns when a file is large for your device, roughly 60 MB on a phone and a few hundred megabytes on a computer, and refuses files above 1 GB. Password protected and encrypted PDFs are refused with an explanation, because ClipLime cannot decrypt them.