PDF Tools

Which tool do you actually need?

Most PDF problems are one of four, and picking the wrong tool is the usual reason people end up doing the job twice.

You have several files and want one. That is Merge PDF. Pages are copied across without re-encoding, so text stays selectable and images keep their resolution — the result is roughly the sum of the inputs.

You have one file and want part of it. If you want the pages as separate files, use Split PDF. If you want a smaller document containing only certain pages, use Extract PDF Pages. If you want the same document with a few pages gone, use Delete PDF Pages. Those three sound alike and produce genuinely different things.

The file is too big to send. Start with Compress PDF, but read why PDFs get large first — the right treatment depends entirely on whether your file is scanned pages or real text, and the wrong one either does nothing or ruins the document.

You need it as something else. PDF to JPG and PDF to PNG render each page as a picture. PDF to Text and PDF to Markdown pull the text back out as text. Going the other way, JPG to PDF turns photos and scans into a single document.

What a browser can and cannot do to a PDF

Being honest about this is more useful than a feature list. Everything on this page runs on your own device, which is genuinely better for most jobs — nothing is uploaded, there is no queue, and a merge finishes faster than an upload would have started. But it is not better for every job, and the limits are worth knowing.

Rearranging a PDF — merging, splitting, rotating, reordering, deleting pages, stamping a watermark, adding page numbers — is something a browser does exactly as well as any server, because none of it re-encodes anything. Those tools have no downside here at all.

Compression is the honest exception. Server tools like Ghostscript can rebuild a PDF's content streams and subset its fonts; the libraries a browser can run cannot. On a text-heavy document a server will beat us, and we say so on the page rather than quietly returning a file that is barely smaller. On scanned documents — the ones people most often need to shrink — the gap is small, because the win there is re-compressing the images, which we do.

Editing existing text inside a PDF is not something any of these tools do. A PDF stores positioned glyphs rather than paragraphs, so "editing" it properly means reflowing a layout that was never stored — which is why the tools that claim it mostly convert to Word and back, losing the layout on the way.

A note on password-protected files

Every PDF tool here will tell you plainly if your file is encrypted, and none of them will guess at the password. A PDF with an open password has to be unlocked first, using a password you know, in a reader that has it. Once it is unlocked it behaves like any other file here.

Nothing is uploaded, and you can check

This is not a policy promise. Open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and run any tool on this page: there is no request carrying your file, because there is no server on the other end of one. How it works walks through the whole path, and Are online PDF tools safe? covers what the alternative actually does with your documents.