Free PDF tools
Twelve PDF tools that do the everyday jobs — editing, signing, combining, splitting, reordering, rotating, watermarking and un-watermarking, numbering, shrinking and converting — without ever asking you to hand your document to a server. Pick a tool, drop your file in, and download the result.
Processed on your device — never uploaded
PDF tools
- Merge PDFCombine several PDFs into one document.Open tool
- Split PDFExtract pages or break a PDF into separate files.Open tool
- Reorder & rotateRearrange, rotate and delete pages with a live preview.Open tool
- Compress PDFShrink a PDF so it is easy to email.Open tool
- Images to PDFTurn JPG and PNG files into one tidy PDF.Open tool
- PDF to imagesExport every page as a PNG or JPG.Open tool
- Excel to PDFTurn one or many spreadsheets into clean PDFs.Open tool
- PDF to ExcelPull tables out of one or many PDFs.Open tool
- PDF editorRewrite the real text, and add shapes and signatures.Open tool
- Watermark PDFStamp text or a logo across every page.Open tool
- Page numbersNumber the pages of any PDF.Open tool
- Remove watermarkFind and delete a watermark, keeping the text.Open tool
Which PDF tool do you need?
A grid of names does not help much when two of them sound alike. Find the row that matches what you are actually trying to do.
Several PDFs that should be one document
Merge PDF — Keeps every page as it was. Use Reorder & rotate afterwards if the order needs work.
One PDF that should be several, or just a few pages out of it
Split PDF — Pulls out page ranges. If you only want to move pages around, Reorder is the lighter job.
Pages upside down, out of order, or one page that must go
Reorder & rotate — A visual page grid. Nothing is re-encoded, so the text and images stay exactly as they were.
A file too large to email
Compress PDF — Recompresses the images, which is where nearly all the weight in a big PDF actually sits.
The wording is wrong
PDF editor — Edits the real text layer rather than pasting a white box over it, so the text stays selectable and searchable.
Numbers trapped in a PDF that belong in a spreadsheet
PDF to Excel — Rebuilds rows and columns from the text layer. A scan with no text layer will not convert.
A draft that should be marked as one
Watermark PDF — Stamps text or a logo over every page. Remove watermark does the reverse.
Why a PDF is large, and what actually shrinks it
Almost every oversized PDF is oversized for one reason: the images inside it are stored at far higher resolution than anything needs. A page scanned at 600 DPI carries roughly four times the pixels of the same page at 300 DPI, and no screen or office printer will show the difference. Compression works on those images. It cannot do much for a text-only document, because text in a PDF is already stored as instructions to draw glyphs rather than as pixels — a hundred-page contract is often smaller than a single photograph. If a PDF is large and compressing it barely moves the number, the weight is usually embedded fonts or an attached file rather than anything an optimiser can reach.
Text layers, scans, and why some PDFs cannot be edited
A PDF made by exporting from Word or Google Docs has a text layer: the characters are really there, and can be selected, searched, edited and converted to a spreadsheet. A PDF made by scanning paper is a picture of text. It looks identical on screen and behaves completely differently — nothing to select, nothing to search, nothing for a converter to read. If you cannot select a sentence with your cursor in any PDF viewer, no tool here can edit or extract that text, because there is no text to work with. Converting a scan requires OCR, which recognises shapes and guesses at characters, and it is a different job with a different failure mode.
Page order without re-encoding
Merging, splitting, reordering, rotating and numbering all rewrite the structure of a PDF while leaving the page contents untouched, byte for byte. That matters more than it sounds: a document can go through all five operations and come out with its text still selectable, its fonts still embedded and its images at their original quality. Compression is the one operation in this category that genuinely alters what is on the page, which is why it is the only one with a quality setting.
Questions
Will any of these break a signed or certified PDF?
Yes, in the sense that a digital signature covers the exact bytes of the file it was applied to. Merging, splitting, compressing or editing produces a different file, so the signature no longer matches and viewers will report it as invalid. That is the signature doing its job. Apply signatures last, after every other change.
Is there a page or file size limit?
Only your device. Nothing is uploaded, so there is no server quota to hit and no queue to wait in — the ceiling is how much memory your browser can give a single tab. A few hundred pages is routine on an ordinary laptop; several thousand very high-resolution scans at once may not be.
Do password-protected PDFs work?
A PDF that opens without prompting you for a password will work. One that is encrypted has to be decrypted before anything can read its pages, and these tools do not attempt that — open it in a viewer with the password and re-save an unprotected copy first.
Why does the page look slightly different after compressing?
Compression re-encodes images at a lower quality, and at aggressive settings that is visible in photographs, gradients and fine detail — as softness or faint blocking. Text is unaffected, because it is not stored as an image. Use a gentler setting for anything that will be printed rather than read on screen.
Your files never leave your device. Every tool on this page runs in your browser using WebAssembly, so your files are never uploaded, never stored, and never seen by us.