PDF Tools

Working with PDF files online

PDF exists to freeze a document's appearance: the same fonts, margins and pagination render identically whether you open the file on a phone, a ten-year-old office printer or a colleague's laptop on the other side of the world. That fidelity is why contracts, payslips, lease paperwork, tax returns, boarding passes and scanned ID cards almost always travel as PDFs. The flip side is that the format is intentionally awkward to edit — the page is a finished artefact, not a working draft — so the moment you need to reorder, shrink or convert one, you need a purpose-built utility rather than a word processor.

Lossy versus lossless operations

The single most useful thing to understand before you touch a PDF is whether an operation is lossless or lossy. Lossless operations rearrange the document's internal objects without re-encoding any content: merging, splitting, deleting pages, rotating and stamping page numbers all fall here, so the text stays selectable and the images stay pixel-for-pixel intact. Lossy operations re-encode the actual pixels — converting pages to JPG, or compressing a scan by rasterizing it — which permanently discards detail in exchange for a smaller file. The practical rule: do every lossless edit you can first, and only reach for a lossy step at the very end, once you know exactly what the file needs to weigh.

When to merge, split or compress

Mergewhen several separate files must arrive as one ordered packet — a loan application, a briefing built from many memos, an invoice bundled with its receipts. Split or delete when a single file holds more than the recipient needs: split to pull a chapter or an invoice out as its own document, delete to drop a blank separator or a confidential appendix while keeping everything else in place. Compressonly when a file is genuinely too heavy to send — and know that the big wins come from scanned, image-heavy documents, because a text-only report is already small and has little to give back.

Converting between PDF and images

Two tools handle the boundary with image formats, and they are mirror images of each other. Images to PDF takes a folder of JPG, PNG or WebP files and lays each one on its own page, which is how you turn a stack of phone-photographed receipts into a single expense report. PDF to JPG goes the other way, rendering each page to a flat raster image you can drop into a slide, post online or run through OCR. Both directions cross the lossy line, so keep your originals: once a page is a picture, the underlying text is gone until you re-recognise it.

A note on encrypted and signed PDFs

Two kinds of protection trip people up. A password-encrypted PDF cannot be parsed at all without its password, so merging, splitting or compressing it fails with an error until you open it in a viewer, supply the password, and save an unprotected copy first. A digitally signedPDF is different: the signature certifies that the bytes have not changed, so any edit — even a lossless rotation — invalidates it. If a document carries a cryptographic signature you intend to preserve, finish all your edits before it is signed, not after.

Why "no upload" matters for documents specifically

A single PDF can carry your home address, a handwritten signature, an account number, a diagnosis or the full text of an agreement under NDA. Sending that to a stranger's server — even for a few seconds — means inheriting their retention policy, their breach history and their terms. Every tool on this page runs inside your own browser tab via JavaScript and WebAssembly, so the bytes never reach the network: the work even continues with your connection switched off, and closing the tab erases every trace.

Popular PDF tools

• Merge PDF — combine several files into one ordered document (lossless).
• Split PDF — pull out a page range or save pages as separate files (lossless).
• Compress PDF — shrink a heavy scan to fit email and upload limits (lossy).
• JPG/PNG to PDF — lay scans and photos out as one tidy PDF.
• PDF to JPG — render pages back out as standalone images.
• Rotate PDF — fix sideways or upside-down scanned pages (lossless).