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PDF tools
Two well-known open source libraries do the work here, both running inside your browser: one reads and draws PDFs, the other writes them. Your documents are never sent anywhere, which for contracts, medical records and identity documents is the whole point.
| Tool | What it does | Accepts |
|---|---|---|
| compress PDF | Rebuild pages as compressed images, or repack the file losslessly | |
| compress to a size | Type a target in KB or MB and reduce the PDF until it fits | |
| merge PDF | Join several PDFs, reorder them first, no page limit | |
| split PDF | Pull out a page range, or break a document into single pages | |
| JPG to PDF | Photos into one PDF, with page size, margin and orientation control | jpg, png |
| PDF to JPG | Render pages to JPEG or PNG at a resolution you choose | |
| delete pages | Remove pages by number and keep everything else intact | |
| rotate PDF | Turn some or all pages and save the rotation permanently | |
| increase PDF KB | Pad a PDF up to a minimum file size, leaving every page identical | |
| crop PDF | Trim margins by setting a crop box, no rasterising | |
| sign a PDF | Draw a signature and place it on a page | |
| reorder pages | Rearrange, reverse or interleave pages by typing an order | |
| page numbers | Stamp numbers in any corner, with a starting value and a format | |
| watermark PDF | Diagonal or horizontal text stamp, with opacity and colour control | |
| resize to A4 | Put mixed page sizes onto one consistent paper size | |
| extract text | Pull the text layer out as plain text, page by page | |
| pages per sheet | Put 2 or 4 pages on one sheet to save paper | |
| PDF metadata | Read and rewrite the title, author and other document properties |
Where browser PDF work has real limits
It is worth knowing what a browser cannot do, so you do not waste an afternoon looking for a tool that cannot exist here.
- Encryption. Documents that need a password to open cannot be read at all. Adding password protection is also out of scope, because the writing library does not implement it.
- OCR. Turning a scan into searchable text needs a recognition engine far heavier than anything sensible to load into a tab.
- Selective image downsampling. The proper way to compress a PDF is to find each embedded image and shrink it. That requires decoding every image format a PDF may contain. The compressor here offers a lossless repack or a full page rebuild instead, and says plainly which one you are getting.
- Editing existing text. Text in a PDF is positioned glyphs, not a document. Changing a word means rebuilding the page.
What works very well
Everything structural. Merging, splitting, deleting, reordering, rotating and cropping all copy page objects around without re-rendering anything, so they are fast, lossless and safe on documents of any size. Stamping numbers and watermarks uses the built-in fonts, which adds almost nothing to the file. Converting between images and PDF pages is straightforward in both directions.
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