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PDF Tools

Eleven PDF tools that run inside your browser tab: combine and split documents, pull out or reorder pages, rotate, watermark, compress, add or remove a password, and export pages as images or plain text. Nothing is uploaded, which matters for the bank statements and contracts people usually bring here.

Which PDF tool do I need?

Four tools sound similar but do different things. Merge PDF joins several files into one. Split PDF breaks one file into separate pieces. Extract pages keeps a chosen set of pages in a new file and leaves the original alone. Reorder and delete pages rebuilds a single document in a new page order. If you want pages 3 to 7 as their own file, extract; if you want to drop page 4 from a report, organize.

  • Presentationrotate PDF fixes pages scanned sideways, and add watermark to PDF stamps text such as DRAFT or CONFIDENTIAL across every page.
  • Sizecompress PDF rebuilds the file with a tighter internal structure.
  • Accessadd a password to encrypt a file with the PDF standards own AES encryption, or remove a password from a file you can already open.
  • Getting content out PDF to image renders each page as a PNG, and PDF to text pulls out the text layer. Going the other way, image to PDF turns photos or scans into one document.

What these tools deliberately cannot do

Removing a password requires the current password. The document key is derived from the password itself, so there is nothing to decrypt with until you supply it — no tool of this kind can open a file you are locked out of, and a wrong password simply errors.

Compression here is structural housekeeping, not image reduction: object streams are packed and stale revisions dropped, but image and font data are copied through byte for byte. A modern, well-built PDF may only shed a few percent, and a document that is mostly scanned photographs will barely move.

Text extraction reads a text layer. A scan is a picture of paper, and pictures contain pixels rather than characters, so extraction returns nothing. Test it by selecting a sentence in any PDF viewer: if it highlights there is a text layer; if your cursor just draws a box, the file needs OCR, which these tools do not attempt.

A sensible order of operations

Most PDF tools refuse encrypted input, so decrypt first, then edit, then re-protect: remove the password, do the page surgery, and add a password back at the end. If a file carries a digital signature, expect any rewrite to invalidate it — the signature was computed over the original bytes.

Frequently asked questions

Can you unlock a PDF if I have lost the password?
No, and no honest tool can. PDF encryption derives the decryption key from the password, so without it the content stays mathematically inaccessible. The remove-password tool only strips protection from files you can already open, which is still useful for archiving statements or letting other tools process them.
Why did compressing my scanned PDF barely change its size?
Because in a scanned document the page images are usually well over 90% of the bytes, and this tool never re-encodes image data — that is what keeps it lossless. It tidies the remaining structure, which in a scan is a small fraction of the file. Real reduction there requires downsampling the images, a lossy step we do not perform.
PDF to text returned nothing for my document. What went wrong?
Almost certainly nothing is wrong with the tool — the PDF has no text layer because it is a scan. Run it through an OCR service first, then extract. A second possibility is a PDF whose fonts lack proper Unicode mappings, which produces garbled characters instead of empty output.
Why do some tools reject my password-protected file?
Merge, split, compress and watermark all need to parse the document structure, and an encrypted file will not open without its password, so loading fails with an error. Run it through the remove-password tool first, do the operation, then add a password back if you still want one.
Will these tools break a digitally signed PDF?
They will invalidate the signature. A signature certifies a specific sequence of bytes, and merging, rotating, compressing or encrypting rewrites the file, so viewers will report the signature as no longer verifiable. The visible content is unaffected — but for signed contracts, keep the signed original untouched.