Duplex scanners and batch scans leave a trail of empty pages: the blank backs of single-sided sheets, separator pages and the occasional double feed. Deleting them one at a time from a hundred-page scan is tedious. Remove Blank Pages examines every page, measures how much ink is actually on it and removes the empty ones in a single pass.
How to use Remove Blank Pages
- Add the scanned PDF.
- Choose a Blank threshold: Normal, Conservative (removes fewer pages) or Aggressive (removes more pages).
- Select Remove Blank Pages.
- Page through the result to confirm nothing important was removed.
How blank pages are detected
- Text is always kept: Pages that contain any selectable text are always kept, however little is written on them.
- How a page is measured: Every other page is rendered as a small grayscale image and measured two ways: how bright the page is overall, and what share of it's covered by darker marks.
- The threshold: A page is removed only when it's very bright and dark marks cover less than a quarter of one percent of it.
- Signatures and stamps survive: So a page with a signature, a stamp or a few handwritten words is normally kept.
Choosing the threshold
- Normal suits most office scans.
- Conservative requires a page to be even closer to pure white before it counts as blank, which protects pages with faint pencil notes or light stamps.
- Aggressive also treats slightly gray pages as blank. This helps with scanners that add a tint or with thin paper that shows the other side through.
- If too much is removed: If a run removes too much, process the original again with Conservative selected.
Where it fits in a scanning workflow
- Do it early: Removing empty pages works best early, before the scan is straightened or made searchable, so later tools have less to process.
- A typical sequence is remove blank pages, then Deskew PDF, then OCR PDF.
- For the occasional page: For an occasional page you want to drop by hand, Remove Pages lets you choose exactly which ones go.
- Where to read more: The scan quality guide covers the rest of the process.
When people use Remove Blank Pages
Duplex scans of one-sided paper
Remove the empty back of every sheet after scanning single-sided documents on a double-sided scanner.
Batch scans with separator sheets
Strip out the blank dividers used to separate documents during a large scanning session.
Tidying long archive scans
Cut stray empty pages from digitized archives so readers don't scroll past dozens of white pages.
Limitations to know
Remove Blank Pages judges pages by brightness and ink coverage, so a page with a tiny mark can be removed and a heavily tinted empty page can survive. Pages with selectable text are never removed. Always review the result before deleting your original scan.
Remove Blank Pages: common questions
Will it remove a page that only has a signature?
It shouldn't. A signature usually covers well over the quarter-of-a-percent limit, so the page is kept. Very small marks on an otherwise white page can fall under the limit, which is why reviewing the result matters.
Why were pages with show-through kept?
Text bleeding through thin paper makes a page darker than pure white. Try the Aggressive setting, which tolerates light tinting, and check the output carefully.
What if every page looks blank?
The tool stops and reports that every page appears blank at the chosen threshold instead of returning an empty document. Try the Conservative setting.
Are the kept pages changed?
No. Kept pages are copied into the new PDF unchanged, including any text layer they already have.