Free PDF tools that work in your browser

Which tool do you actually need?

People arrive at a page like this with a problem rather than a tool in mind. The file is too big, or it is the wrong format, or half of it should not be going to the person asking for it. Here is the shortest route from the problem to the answer.

If none of those quite matches, the search box above takes plain words. Typing shrink finds the compressor and typing combine finds merge, because it looks at what each tool does rather than only what it is called.

Why the order of operations matters

Most jobs need more than one step, and doing them in the wrong order wastes effort or quietly loses quality.

Split before you compress. If you only need four pages out of a hundred, take them first. Compressing the whole document and then extracting from it means you spent effort on ninety six pages you were about to discard.

Merge before you compress. Combining first lets the compressor work across the whole document at once, and it means you check the size of the thing you are actually sending rather than of its parts.

Resize pictures before turning them into a PDF. A document built from twenty full resolution phone photos is enormous no matter what you do to it afterwards. Bring the pictures down first and the resulting file is a fraction of the size with no visible difference.

Compress last, always. It is a finishing step. Anything you do to a document after compressing it may undo the saving.

A few things about PDFs that save a lot of confusion

Not every PDF contains text

This one catches people constantly. A PDF made by exporting from Word contains real text you can select, search and copy. A PDF made by scanning paper contains photographs of pages, and there is no text in it at all, even though you can plainly read it on screen.

That difference explains a lot. It is why some documents can be searched and others cannot, why some compress well and others do not, and why copying a paragraph works in one file and not in another. If you need the words out of a scan, our image to text tool reads them from a picture of the page.

File sizes do not divide neatly

Take ten pages out of a hundred page document and the result will rarely be a tenth of the size. A PDF shares resources across the whole file: one copy of a font serves every page that uses it, and a logo repeated in every header is stored once. When you split, each new document has to carry its own copy of whatever its pages depend on.

The same works in reverse when merging. Two files of five megabytes often produce a combined document smaller than ten, because shared fonts and images get pooled.

Passwords genuinely block everything

A password protected PDF is encrypted, not merely locked in a polite way. No browser tool can open one, and neither can most server tools without the password. Remove it in the application that created the file or in your PDF reader, then work with the unprotected copy.

Getting under an email or upload limit

This is the single most common reason anyone opens a PDF tool, so it is worth knowing the ceilings and the order to attack them in.

• Consumer email usually stops somewhere around twenty to twenty five megabytes for the whole message, not per attachment.
• Corporate mail servers are often stricter, commonly ten to twenty, and set by an IT policy you cannot see.
• Job and tender portals are frequently the tightest, sometimes five megabytes or less.
• Attachment encoding inflates a file by roughly a third in transit, so a document sitting just under the stated limit can still bounce.

Work through it in this order. Remove pages you do not need. Compress. If it is still too heavy, split it into two documents and send them separately, which is nearly always accepted and nearly always easier than fighting the limit.

Scanned documents behave differently

Anything that came off a scanner or a phone camera is a set of images, and that changes what each tool does for you.

Scans compress dramatically, often by seventy percent or more, because the pictures inside them are the whole file. Page numbers printed on the paper will not match the page positions in the file, since a scanner counts sheets rather than reading numbers. Double sided scanning captures the blank backs of pages, which is why splitting tools show thumbnails rather than asking you to type numbers. And a page fed in the wrong way up stays that way, because splitting and merging copy pages exactly as they are rather than tidying them.

If you are scanning yourself, a few habits help: keep the pages flat, use even light with no shadow across the paper, crop close to the page, and check the smallest text is readable before you commit to fifty pages.

What happens to your pages

Merging and splitting copy finished pages into a new container. Nothing inside a page is rebuilt, so text stays selectable, images keep the resolution they arrived with, embedded fonts travel across and links inside the pages keep working. If a tool changes how your pages look while combining or separating them, it is doing more than you asked.

Compressing is different by nature, because making a file smaller means giving something up. The honest version is to tell you what: either structural tidying that changes nothing you can see, or redrawing pages at a lower resolution, which makes text part of an image. Our compressor lets you pick and shows the result before you save it, rather than choosing for you.

Why none of this uploads your files

Look at what people put through PDF tools. Contracts. Bank statements. Payslips. Medical letters. Passport and identity scans for visa applications. Legal correspondence. Tender documents under embargo.

The ordinary route is to upload all of it to a free website found through a search result. The file then sits on hardware you cannot inspect, for a period set by a policy almost nobody reads, handled by a company you had not heard of ten minutes earlier. There is a particular irony in uploading a document to a stranger’s server in order to remove the page you considered too private to send.

Every tool here loads an open source library into your browser and then works on your own machine. Nothing is sent anywhere. If you would rather see that than be told it, open the network panel in your developer tools before you start: the library comes down, your file never goes up. A practical benefit is that once a page has loaded, it keeps working with your connection switched off entirely, and there is nothing to delete afterwards because nothing was stored.

The limits, stated plainly

Working locally has real advantages and one real constraint: your own device does the work, so its memory is the ceiling.

A desktop or laptop handles very large documents comfortably. A phone manages ordinary ones and struggles with two hundred page scans at high resolution. Where a tool has a sensible cap it tells you the number and the reason, and where a job is too big it says so before you wait rather than after.

In exchange there is no account, no daily allowance, no queue, no watermark and no size cap sold back to you as a subscription. If a document is genuinely too large for your device, splitting it in half and working on the pieces solves it almost every time.

Beyond documents

Documents are one part of the toolkit. If your pictures need attention before they become a PDF, the image tools handle compressing, resizing and converting. The text and speech tools read words out of scans and read text aloud. And if you are assembling an application rather than just a file, the career tools cover resumes, letters and letterheads.