PDF Tools12 tools

PDF tools that never see your documents

PDF is the format people reach for when something matters: a signed contract, a passport page, a bank statement, an application pack. It is also the format most commonly handled by uploading it to whichever free website appears first, which means handing exactly those documents to a company you know nothing about, and trusting a deletion policy you have not read.

The tools in this group do not work that way. They run inside your browser and construct the file on your own device, so there is no upload, no queue, no account, and no copy sitting on a server. You can load the page, disconnect from the internet, and they still work.

Image to PDF is the one most people need. It turns a folder of phone photos into a single PDF, in the order you choose, either fitting each page to its image or placing them on A4 or Letter pages with a margin. That is the exact shape of the job when a visa application, a university form or an expense claim insists on one file and you have seven photographs.

It is more careful than it looks. Images are re-encoded to baseline JPEG before being embedded, so the result opens in every reader rather than only the forgiving ones. Transparent areas are flattened onto white instead of turning black, which is the usual outcome when a PNG goes into a PDF. Very large photographs are scaled down first, because a 48 megapixel phone picture silently produces a blank page on an iPhone otherwise.

Beyond rearranging pages there are the jobs that change what a PDF is. Extract text from PDF pulls the words out page by page when the file carries a real text layer, and tells you plainly when it does not, because a scan is pictures of words and needs OCR instead. Compress PDF shrinks scans and image-heavy files by rebuilding them, and says up front that a text document is the wrong candidate. PDF to JPG turns pages into images, and image to PDF goes the other way when a form insists on one file.

For finishing a document there is sign PDF, which lets you draw or type a signature and place it on any page entirely inside the browser, which matters more here than anywhere else on the site: a contract you sign should not be sitting on a stranger's server. Watermark PDF marks drafts and confidential copies, page numbers adds the numbering a bound document needs, and rotate fixes the pages a scanner fed in sideways.

The page-editing basics are all here too. Merge PDF joins files in the order you arrange them, split PDF pulls out a range or breaks a document into single pages, delete pages removes the ones that should never have been scanned, and reorder pages drags them into the right sequence.

If the finished file is too large for an upload limit, the quality setting is the fastest fix, and running the photographs through the image compressor first gives you more control still. More PDF tools will land in this group over time, and every one of them will keep the same rule: your documents stay on your device.