Duplex scanning a stack of single-sided paper leaves you with a document where every other page is empty, and finding them by hand is exactly the sort of work nobody should be doing. The catch is that a scanned page is never actually blank: it has speckle from the paper, a grey cast from the lamp and often a dark strip where the sheet ended. So blankness here is measured rather than assumed. Each page is rendered and the share of pixels carrying ink is counted, with a threshold you can move and an option to ignore the outer edge where scanner borders live. Every page is shown as a thumbnail with its ink figure, and any decision can be overridden before the cleaned file is built.
Features
Measures ink coverage on every page rather than guessing from the text layer
Adjustable threshold for noisy scans and faint pencil marks
Ignores a configurable outer margin, where scanner borders and edge shadows appear
Thumbnail of every page with its measured coverage
Click any page to override the verdict before exporting
Removed pages summarised as ranges, such as 2-4, 7
Rebuilds the document with the kept pages in their original order and quality
How to use the Blank Page Remover
Drop the scanned PDF onto the page and let it measure each sheet
Adjust the threshold or edge margin if the verdicts look wrong, then rescan
Click any thumbnail to keep or drop that page by hand
The empty reverse of each sheet is found by measurement, not by page number.
Common errors & troubleshooting
Pages with faint pencil or a light letterhead are dropped. — Lower the threshold so less ink is needed to count as content. The coverage figure under each thumbnail tells you what value would keep them.
Genuinely empty pages are kept. — The scanner is adding noise. Raise the threshold a little, or increase the ignored edge if the marks sit around the border rather than in the body.
Every page reads as blank on a text-only PDF. — Check the page actually renders — a document that depends on a missing font can come out empty. The thumbnails show what was measured.
The download button is unavailable. — Either nothing is marked for removal, in which case the export would just copy the original, or everything is, which would leave an empty document. Click a thumbnail to change a verdict.
Frequently asked questions
How is a blank page detected?
Each page is rendered small and every pixel is checked against a darkness cutoff. The share of pixels that count as ink is the coverage figure, and a page falls below the threshold is treated as blank.
What coverage value counts as empty?
The default is 0.35% of pixels carrying ink, which clears typical scanner speckle while keeping a page with a single line of text. Clean digital PDFs measure exactly zero on an empty page.
Why does my scan have a dark edge on every page?
The scanner lid or the sheet edge casts a shadow at the platen border. Ignoring the outer 2 to 5 per cent of the page removes it from the measurement without touching the exported pages themselves.
Are the kept pages re-compressed?
No. The pages are copied into a new document as they are, so text stays selectable and images keep their original quality — only the page list changes.
Can I use this to remove separator sheets rather than blanks?
Not automatically, since a separator sheet usually carries a barcode or a block of colour and reads as content. You can click those thumbnails to mark them for removal by hand.
Related tools
Split PDF — Extract pages or ranges (e.g. 1-3,5,7-9) into a new PDF.
Organize PDF — Reorder, rotate and delete pages from thumbnails, then export.
PDF to Images — Render PDF pages to PNG or JPG images you can download.
Merge PDFs — Combine multiple PDFs into one, with reordering.
Compress PDF — Shrink a PDF by re-rendering each page to a JPEG at a chosen quality and resolution.
PDF to Text — Extract selectable text from a PDF as plain text or Markdown.