How to delete PDF pages using Python

This tutorial shows you how to delete PDF pages using our delete PDF page Python API. The free plan includes 200 credits. Different operations consume different amounts of credits, so the number of PDF documents you can generate varies. Create a free account(opens in a new tab) to access your API key.

Why delete PDF pages?

Deleting PDF pages is essential for document workflows that require removing sensitive or unnecessary content. Common use cases include:

• Data privacy compliance — Remove pages containing confidential information before sharing documents externally, ensuring sensitive data doesn’t leave your organization.
• Storage optimization — Delete unnecessary pages to reduce file size and cloud storage costs, which is especially important for high-volume document processing.
• Document preparation — Remove draft pages, cover sheets, or annotations before final distribution to clients or stakeholders.
• Automated processing — Filter out specific page ranges as part of backend document workflows, streamlining document management pipelines.
• Content curation — Extract relevant sections by removing everything else, creating focused documents for specific audiences or purposes.

The delete PDF page API automates this process in your workflow.

Nutrient DWS Processor API

Deleting PDF pages is just one of the operations possible with our 30+ PDF API tools. You can combine our deletion tool with other tools to create complex document processing workflows, such as:

• Converting MS Office files and images into PDFs before removing pages
• Removing pages from two documents before merging them
• Deleting pages and then watermarking and flattening PDFs

Once you create your account, you’ll be able to access all our PDF API tools.

Getting started

You’ll need to:

• Create a free account to access your live API key.
• Install Python on your system. You can download Python here(opens in a new tab).

Step 1 — Creating a free account on Nutrient

Go to our website(opens in a new tab), where you’ll see the page below, prompting you to create your free account.

Once you’ve created your account, you’ll be welcomed by a page showing an overview of your plan details.

You’ll start with 200 credits to process, and you’ll be able to access all our PDF API tools.

Step 2 — Obtaining the API key

After you’ve verified your email, you can get your API key from the dashboard. In the menu on the left, click API keys. You’ll see the following page, which is an overview of your keys.

Copy the Live API key, because you’ll need this for the delete PDF page API.

Step 3 — Setting up folders and files

Create a folder called delete_pdf and open it in a code editor. This tutorial uses VS Code. Next, create two folders inside delete_pdf and name them input_documents and processed_documents.

Then, in the root folder, delete_pdf, create a file called processor.py. This is the file where you’ll keep your code.

Now your folder structure will look like this:

delete_pdf
├── input_documents
├── processed_documents
└── processor.py

Step 4 — Writing the code

Open the processor.py file and paste the code below into it:

import requests
import json

response = requests.request(
  'POST',
  'https://api.nutrient.io/build',
  headers = {
    'Authorization': 'Bearer YOUR_API_KEY_HERE'
  },
  files = {
    'document': open('input_documents/document.pdf', 'rb')
  },
  data = {
    'instructions': json.dumps({
      'parts': [
        {
          'file': 'document',
          'pages': {
            'end': 2
          }
        },
        {
          'file': 'document',
          'pages': {
            'start': 4
          }
        }
      ]
    })
  },
  stream = True
)

if response.ok:
  with open('processed_documents/result.pdf', 'wb') as fd:
    for chunk in response.iter_content(chunk_size=8096):
      fd.write(chunk)
else:
  print(response.text)
  exit()

Code explanation

In the code above, you first import the requests and json dependencies. After that, you create the instructions for the API call. These instructions keep pages 1–3 (indices 0–2) and page 5 onward (index 4+), effectively deleting page 4 (index 3).

You then use the requests module to make the API call, and once it succeeds, you store the result in the processed_documents folder.

Output

To execute the code, use the command below:

python3 processor.py

Once the code has been executed, you’ll see a new processed file under the processed_documents folder called result.pdf.

The folder structure will look like this:

delete_pdf
├── input_documents
|    └── document.pdf
├── processed_documents
|    └── result.pdf
└── processor.py

Additional resources

Explore more ways to work with Nutrient API:

• Postman collection — Test API endpoints directly in Postman
• Zapier integration — Automate document workflows without code
• MCP Server — PDF automation for LLM applications
• Python client — Official Python library

Conclusion

This tutorial showed you how to delete pages from a PDF document in your Python application using our delete PDF page API.

Integrate these functions into your existing applications to remove pages from PDFs. With the same API token, you can perform other operations, such as merging documents into a single PDF, adding watermarks, and more. To get started with a free trial, sign up(opens in a new tab) here.

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