PDF Tools

Free PDF utilities that run entirely in your browser. 13 tools — merge, split, rotate, watermark, OCR, redact, and more. Your PDFs never leave your device.

The PDF tools you need without uploading anything

PDF is the universal "final form" of a document. It looks the same on every device, prints predictably, and resists casual editing. The price you pay for those qualities is that PDFs are hard to manipulate compared to source documents. Merging, splitting, rotating, watermarking, redacting — none of these are operations you can do with a basic PDF viewer. The options have been Adobe Acrobat Pro (expensive), desktop tools that work but require installation, or web services that ask you to upload your document to their server. For sensitive documents (contracts, medical records, internal reports), the upload path is the wrong tradeoff.

These PDF tools run entirely in your browser. The underlying engine is pdf-lib (for creating and modifying PDFs) and pdf.js (Mozilla's reference parser, for rendering and text extraction). Both are JavaScript libraries that have spent the last decade getting good at what they do. Together they cover the everyday PDF workflows: combining several PDFs into one, pulling specific pages out, reducing file size, rotating pages that came out of the scanner sideways, adding "CONFIDENTIAL" watermarks before sharing a draft, applying page numbers, reordering pages with drag-and-drop, extracting text for use in other tools, running OCR on scanned documents, and visually redacting sensitive regions.

The privacy guarantee is concrete: there are no PDF upload endpoints on this site. Open DevTools while using any of these tools and the network panel stays empty — only static asset loads (the page's JavaScript chunks, cached after first use) appear. Your PDF is read into browser memory by the File API, processed locally by the WebAssembly and JavaScript code on the page, and handed back to you as a blob URL for download. The browser controls the lifecycle of that data; the moment you close the tab, it is gone.

For a longer explanation of why the site is built this way, see the about page. For specific guides on common PDF workflows, see the guides section — articles on stripping PDF metadata for anonymous sharing, converting scanned PDFs with OCR, redacting PDFs safely, and more.

All PDF tools

Merge PDF

Combine multiple PDF files into one document

Split PDF

Extract specific pages from a PDF file

Compress PDF

Reduce PDF file size by stripping metadata

PDF to Image

Convert PDF pages to PNG or JPG images

Image to PDF

Combine images into a single PDF document

PDF Metadata Viewer

Inspect title/author/creator metadata in a PDF and strip it before sharing

PDF Rotate

Rotate individual pages or the whole document by 90/180/270 degrees

PDF Watermark

Add a text watermark (CONFIDENTIAL, DRAFT, attribution) to every page

PDF Page Numbers

Add page numbers to a PDF — pick format, position, font size, skip cover page

PDF to Text

Extract plain text from any text-based PDF — clean output ready to paste or process

PDF Page Reorder

Drag-and-drop to reorder PDF pages, delete pages, save a new PDF

PDF OCR

Run OCR on a scanned PDF to extract text — runs Tesseract entirely in your browser

PDF Redaction

Draw black rectangles over PDF content — visual redaction for screenshots and print

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to install anything to use these PDF tools?

No. Every PDF tool here runs in your browser using pdf-lib and pdf.js. There's no installer, no plugin, no browser extension. You drop a PDF onto the page, the work happens in JavaScript and WebAssembly, you get a downloadable result. The first time you use a PDF tool, the underlying libraries (~400 KB for pdf.js, similar for pdf-lib) lazy-load once and cache for the rest of your session.

Are my PDFs uploaded to your server?

No. There are no PDF upload endpoints on our server. Every operation runs locally in your browser. Open DevTools and watch the Network panel while you use any tool — the only requests you will see are static asset loads (CSS, JS chunks), never a file upload. This is the core privacy guarantee of the site and the main reason it exists.

How large a PDF can I work with?

Practical browser limits put the ceiling around 1-2 GB for most desktop browsers. Above that, browser tab memory becomes the binding constraint. In practice, anything you would email or upload to a typical web form fits comfortably. Page count limits depend on the tool — Page Reorder renders a thumbnail per page, so very long documents (1000+ pages) take a few seconds to render thumbnails; manipulation operations themselves are linear in page count and fast.

Can I work with password-protected PDFs?

Not directly. pdf-lib does not support decryption in the browser. If your PDF is encrypted, decrypt it first (in Adobe Reader: File → Properties → Security tab → Save As without security), then run the unencrypted version through these tools. You can re-encrypt afterwards if needed using a desktop tool.

What's the difference between PDF to Text and PDF OCR?

PDF to Text uses pdf.js to read the text layer of a PDF — fast and accurate, but only works for PDFs that have real text inside them (most PDFs created by Word, LaTeX, browsers, etc.). PDF OCR uses Tesseract.js to recognize text from page images — slow (~10 seconds per page) and less accurate, but works on scanned PDFs where the "text" is actually pixels. Try PDF to Text first; switch to OCR only if you see empty pages.

Does the redaction tool actually remove the underlying text?

No, and we are transparent about this. PDF Redaction draws opaque black rectangles over the regions you mark, but the underlying text is still in the PDF file. For most use cases (screenshots, printed copies, sharing with non-technical recipients) this is sufficient. For high-stakes disclosure (court filings, FOIA responses, classified material) you need a tool that performs true content-stream redaction — Adobe Acrobat Pro's Redact feature is the canonical option. The about-section on the Redaction tool explains this in more detail.