Easily delete and remove unwanted pages from any PDF document offline.
In the PDF specification, the document's page order is dictated by an array of object references called the /Kids array inside the Pages dictionary.
When you "delete" a page, the first step is simply removing its reference from this array. To the PDF viewer, the page instantly vanishes.
However, simply removing the reference pointer is not enough. If the deleted page contained a 5MB high-resolution image, that image data (stored as an XObject) is still buried inside the file's binary stream, taking up space.
Because nothing points to it anymore, it is known as an orphaned object.
To ensure the final file size actually shrinks, our engine performs a Garbage Collection pass before saving.
It traverses the entire object tree, identifying any fonts, images, or vector paths that belonged exclusively to the pages you just deleted, and permanently scrubs those binary chunks from the file, optimizing the final size.
If a PDF tool only removes a page's reference from the /Kids array without doing garbage collection, what happens?
