Page-range links

A page-range link lets you share only a portion of your PDF. When you set a range, recipients receive exactly the pages you specify — no more, no less. The hidden pages never reach their browser: the trimming happens on EveryPage servers before any bytes are streamed, so this is a server-side restriction rather than a viewer-side one. The public viewer metadata still reports the document's total page count when it is known, so a recipient can tell that pages exist outside the window — they simply never receive them.

Setting and clearing ranges

You control page ranges in the file settings. Narrow a link to specific pages by entering a start and end page number. The Pro plan allows you to set ranges; any plan can clear a range by leaving both fields empty or resetting them to 0.

Ranges can only be set on files up to 100 MB. A ranged serve rewrites the whole document through pdfcpu on every request, so the same size cap that applies to watermarked downloads applies here.

A page-range restriction stays in place even if your subscription downgrades. This prevents accidental disclosure: if you've already sent a link to pages 5–12, downgrading from Pro to free will not suddenly expose the full document to recipients who followed the earlier link. The restriction remains until you deliberately remove it.

Clearing a range is un-gated, so a downgraded account can always undo the restriction.

How enforcement works

The PDF is physically trimmed using the pdfcpu library before any bytes leave the server. The serve handler decrypts the document to a temporary file, applies the page-range trim, streams only the trimmed result, and deletes the temporary files on return. This is the same pipeline that handles watermarking, with the trim step running first so watermarks appear only on the pages viewers see.

Enforcement fails closed: if the trim operation encounters an error — whether from a malformed range, a document structure the library cannot parse, or any other fault — the request fails with an error rather than falling back to serving the full document. A trim that resolves to zero pages is also treated as a failure, so a stale page count can never cause an empty file to be served in place of the window. A stored range pair the server cannot interpret triggers a 500 for non-owners instead of silently widening access.

Trimming uses pdfcpu's reduced-feature output: annotations, outlines and some complex page-tree entries are dropped from the served window. The pages a recipient reads are intended for viewing, not archival.

Variant overrides

When you use link variants to send customized links to different recipients, you can set a different page range for each variant. The variant's range overrides the document-level setting, so one recipient might see pages 1–5 while another sees pages 10–15, both from the same file.

What owners always see

File owners always receive the complete document when downloading their own file, regardless of any page-range setting. This ensures you can verify the full content you've shared and check that the range restriction is working as intended.

Analytics and reporting

Telemetry reflects what recipients actually saw. A reader on a page-ranged link only ever sees the trimmed document, so their session never writes the document's stored page count — a five-page window must not overwrite the real total. Readership responses for a ranged file also carry the window size, so the read-through funnel is labelled against the pages you shared instead of implying that readers dropped off before pages they were never sent.

When ranges fail

If a stored page range becomes invalid — for instance, if the range ceiling is lowered in a future version and your old range exceeds it — the document remains protected: non-owner requests return an error. The range pair remains visible in your file settings so you can review and correct it, and it is hidden from the public viewer metadata.

A file that carries a range but is larger than the 100 MB transform cap also refuses to serve to non-owners, for both inline viewing and download. The settings form will not create that state — it can only arise on a file whose range predates the cap, or one whose content was later replaced with a larger document. Clearing the range restores access to the full file.