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PDF Tools

Everyday PDF operations (merging, splitting, rotating, compressing and converting) that run entirely on your own machine. Your files are never uploaded, which makes these safe for contracts, payroll and client work.

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Overview

About pdf tools

Most PDF tasks are small and annoying. Two signed pages need to become one document. A 40-page report needs to lose its appendix. A scan came out sideways. A file is 2 MB too large for a submission portal. None of it is hard, and none of it should require an account, a subscription, or handing a confidential document to a company you have never heard of.

That last part is the reason these tools work the way they do. Almost every free PDF site online uploads your file to a server, does the work there, and sends it back. For a holiday photo that is fine. For a signed contract, a payroll summary or a client's financial statements, you have just transmitted confidential material to a third party and accepted whatever their retention policy happens to say.

These tools do the work in your browser instead. The file is read from disk into memory on your own device, modified there, and written back out. It never travels. A useful side effect is that there is no upload wait and no file size ceiling imposed by a server: the practical limit is your own machine's memory.

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Free

Merge PDF

Merging is the operation people reach for most, usually because a document arrived in pieces. Drop in any number of files, drag them into the right order, trim page ranges if you only need part of one, and download a single combined PDF. Like everything in this category, the files stay on your machine.

Open Merge PDF

What it does

  • Reorder files before merging
  • Merge any number of files
  • Page-range selection per file
  • Original quality: pages are copied, never re-encoded
  • Runs entirely in your browser, no uploads

12 tools

All PDF tools

Merge, split, rotate and convert PDFs.

Why they help

What makes these PDF tools worth using

  • Confidential files never leave your device

    No upload means no third-party copy of your contracts, payroll or client records. This is the whole reason to use a local tool for PDFs.

  • No upload or download wait

    Work starts the moment you pick a file. A 60 MB document does not need to travel to a server and back before anything happens.

  • No upload, so no upload queue

    Free PDF sites cap file sizes because bandwidth costs them money. Nothing is transferred here, so the cap is 100MB a file: the point where a browser tab risks running out of memory, not a bandwidth bill.

  • Page-level control

    Select individual pages, reorder them by dragging, invert a selection to delete instead of extract. The page is the unit you actually think in.

  • Works on a phone

    Rotating a sideways scan or merging two pages is often something you need to do away from a desk. These run in a mobile browser too.

  • Honest about what compression does

    Structural optimization is lossless; image re-encoding is not. The quality control shows you the trade-off rather than promising a magic size reduction.

In practice

How these tools get used

Three situations these come up in, written the way they actually happen.

  1. An operations manager

    Assembling a signed contract from scattered pages

    The contract came back as three separate PDFs: the agreement, a signature page scanned upside down, and an appendix. You rotate the signature page, merge all three in the right order, and file one clean document: without a signed contract ever leaving the building.

  2. A bookkeeper at year end

    Splitting a bank statement bundle by client

    A single 120-page export covers six clients. You split it by page range into six files, each named for its client, and attach them to the right folders. Because nothing is uploaded, you are not moving other people's financial data through a third party to do it.

  3. A job applicant

    Getting a portfolio under a size limit

    An application portal caps uploads at 5 MB and your portfolio is 11 MB, mostly high-resolution scans. You compress it with the quality slider set where the images still read well, watch the estimated size drop under the limit, and submit.

FAQ

PDF Tools questions

The things people most often want to know before they start.

Correct. The PDF is read into memory by your browser and modified on your own device. You can verify this yourself by opening your browser's network tab while using a tool, or by disconnecting from the internet after the page loads: the tools keep working.

Yes. Each tool refuses a file over 100MB, and the image-to-PDF converter applies it to the combined selection rather than to each picture. The cap is about memory rather than bandwidth, because nothing is uploaded: past roughly that size a browser tab risks running out of room partway through the job, and failing at the start is better than failing halfway.

Three of them reduce size in different ways, and the right one depends on why the file is large. Compress re-encodes images and tidies the structure, which helps a scan-heavy document and does almost nothing to plain text. Extract keeps only the pages you need. Split breaks one file into several so each piece is small enough to send. If a document is large because it is long rather than because it is detailed, compressing it is the wrong tool.

No. Structural optimization is lossless and leaves text selectable and sharp. Only embedded images are re-encoded, and only as far as the quality setting you choose.

Yes. Select the pages you want to remove and invert the selection: the download then contains everything except those pages, with the original file left untouched.

Yes, for the page-level ones. Reordering, deleting and rotating pages are all in the organise tool, on one grid, saved once. Doing them as three separate downloads works too and is slower, and each save rewrites the file. Compression is the exception worth leaving until last, because it should run on the document you have finished editing rather than one you are about to change again.

Once the page has loaded, the processing itself needs no connection. If your connection drops mid-task, the work in progress continues.

Keep exploring

Other tools people tend to need alongside these.

Get started with PDF tools

Every tool here is free, needs no account, and runs in your browser. Pick one and start working.

Open Merge PDFSee all categories