Free online PDF tools for every document task

Twenty-one tools covering the things people actually need to do to a PDF: rearrange it, make it smaller, turn it into something else, sign it, secure it, or pull the text out of a scan. All free, with no account and nothing added to the document you download.

The unusual part is where the work happens. Every tool here runs inside your own browser — none of the twenty-one contacts a server at all. Your document is read from your disk, processed in memory on your machine, and saved back by the browser itself. Nothing is uploaded, so there is no transfer to intercept and nothing on our side to store, and the tools keep working even if your connection drops halfway through.

Which PDF tool do you need?

Rearranging a document

The page-level tools all work the same way: your document is parsed into its pages, you say what should happen to them, and a new file is written. Nothing is re-rendered, so text stays selectable and quality is untouched. Merge joins files in the order you arrange them, Split breaks one apart at the points you choose, and Organize gives you every page as a thumbnail to drag into place. Rotate fixes pages scanned sideways, and Extract and Delete are two views of the same job — keeping what you want, or dropping what you do not.

Making a PDF smaller

Compress PDF is the direct route, and it works on what usually dominates a large file: the images inside it. A text-only document is already small and has little to give up, while a scanned or image-heavy one can shrink dramatically. Before compressing, it is worth asking whether every page needs to be there — removing a fifth of the pages removes roughly a fifth of the weight, and costs no quality at all. For a scan, running OCR first also gets the words out into a Word or text file, which is often worth more to you than the last few hundred kilobytes.

Converting to and from other formats

Conversion is the least predictable part of any PDF workflow, because a PDF describes where marks sit on a page rather than what they mean. Going out to Word works best on documents that were generated from a word processor in the first place; heavily designed layouts and multi-column reports need tidying afterwards. Going the other way, Word to PDF is reliable, because a PDF can describe anything a document can. For images, PDF to JPG and PDF to PNG render each page as a picture — choose PNG for pages of text and diagrams, JPG for pages that are mostly photographs — while JPG to PDF and PNG to PDF turn a folder of images into a single document. Create PDF starts one from scratch.

Signing, marking and securing

Sign PDF places a drawn, typed or uploaded signature wherever you need it, which covers the everyday case of returning a form. Watermark PDF stamps text across pages for drafts and confidential copies, and Add Page Numbers handles the position, the starting number and the numbering style for anything going to print.

On security, two tools do opposite jobs and it is worth being precise about both. Protect PDF adds a password, or restricts printing and copying without one. Unlock PDF removes a password you already know, or lifts permission restrictions from a file that opens freely. Neither recovers a password nobody has — no legitimate tool does, and anything claiming otherwise is worth avoiding.

Working with scans

A scanned page is a photograph of text, which is why searching it finds nothing. OCR PDF reads those pictures and produces the words, across 13 languages, handing you a Word, plain text or rich text file containing them. Note what that is and is not: you get the words as an editable document, not your original PDF with an invisible text layer added \u2014 the uploaded file comes back unchanged. Accuracy tracks the quality of the scan more than anything else: straight, clean, adequately sized pages read well; faint faxes, skewed photocopies and photographs taken of a screen read badly. Where a scan is poor, rescanning beats any amount of post-processing.

Frequently asked questions