All PDF Tools

Which tool do I need?

Most people arrive knowing the symptom rather than the operation. The file is too big to send, the text cannot be selected, the pages are in the wrong order, someone needs to sign it. Each of those points at one tool, and picking the wrong one is what turns a thirty-second job into an afternoon.

The file is too big to send

Divide the file size by the page count first. Anything above roughly 500 KB per page means images are responsible, and Compress PDF will do most of the work, commonly 70 to 90 percent on a scan. Below that figure the document is mostly text and already near its floor, so compressing harder gains very little. The faster fix there is removing the pages you do not need.

The text cannot be selected or searched

That means you have a scan, which is an image of a page rather than a page of text. OCR PDF reads the image and writes an invisible text layer behind it. The document looks identical afterwards and becomes searchable, selectable, and readable by screen readers. Run it before compressing, because recognition needs the image detail that compression removes.

You need to edit the content

Convert it back to the format it came from. PDF to Word handles reports, letters, and anything that started in a word processor. PDF to Excel is for tables and financial statements. A PDF does not record where paragraphs begin, so any converter has to infer structure from position on the page. Multi-column magazine layouts are where that guesswork shows, and those are worth tidying by hand afterwards.

The pages are wrong

Three tools overlap here enough to cause real confusion. Remove pages leaves you with the original minus a few sheets. Extract pages leaves you with a new file containing only the pages you picked. Split PDF divides the document into several files when you intend to keep more than one of them. Decide what you want to be holding at the end and the choice makes itself.

It needs protecting

A PDF can carry two different passwords and they are not equally strong. Protect PDF sets the kind that is required to open the file, which is enforced by encryption. An owner password lets anyone open the document and merely asks their software not to allow printing or copying, which is a convention rather than a barrier. Sign PDF answers a different question: who approved this document, and has it changed since.

The order that saves rework

When a job needs several steps, sequence matters more than people expect. Unlock anything encrypted first, since most operations cannot read a protected file. Fix orientation next with Rotate PDF, because OCR, cropping, and page numbering all assume the page is the right way up. Trim to the pages you actually want before merging. Leave compression and page numbers until last, since numbers added before a merge end up out of sequence and compressing the parts separately gets partly undone when they are combined.

How these tools run

Every tool here processes files on our servers rather than in browser JavaScript, which is why conversions finish in seconds instead of stalling on large documents. The one exception is the document scanner, where edge detection and perspective correction run on your own device, so photographs of passports and contracts never leave your machine until you choose to make a PDF.

Files are capped at 50 MB each and deleted within an hour of upload. There are no accounts, no watermarks, and no cap on how many times you use a tool. If a document matters, keep your own copy of the original before editing it here, because the version you upload will not be around to retrieve later.