Free PDF tools
40 tools that each do one thing to a PDF and then get out of the way. Pick the job below and its page will tell you what the tool changes, what it leaves alone, and where it gives up — before you upload anything. Nothing here needs an account, and what you upload is deleted after 2 hours.
Edit and inspect
The two that are not single-purpose tools: one changes the document, the other only looks at it.
- PDF editor
Change text that is already in the document, add text, images, links, form fields, signatures, whiteout, annotations, shapes and stamps, and manage pages — then apply the changes and download a new PDF.
- PDF inspector
Page count and page sizes, PDF version, metadata, encryption, tagging, and whether the file has a real text layer or is a picture of one. It runs in your browser and uploads nothing.
Put documents together
Several files, or several passes of a scanner, that need to end up as one document.
- Merge PDFCombine several PDFs into one file, in the order you arrange them. Bookmarks and form fields are kept, and each file can contribute a bookmark so the result is navigable.
- Alternate & Mix PDFInterleave the pages of two or more PDFs — the fix for a document scanned in two passes, fronts in one file and backs in the other. The backs can be reversed, because a sheet-fed scanner gives them to you upside-down in reverse order.
- Organize PDF pagesReorder, duplicate or drop pages by writing the order you want, for example 3,1,2 or 1-5,8. A page listed twice appears twice.
Take documents apart
One long file that has to become several, or a few pages that have to come out of it.
- Split PDF by pagesSplit a document after chosen page numbers, or every N pages. Each part comes back as its own file, zipped together.
- Split PDF in halfCut a document into two halves. An odd page count puts the extra page in the first half, and the result says so.
- Split PDF by sizeSplit a document into parts no larger than a size you choose — for an email attachment limit or an upload cap. A single page bigger than the limit is kept whole rather than corrupted.
- Split PDF by bookmarksSplit at the document’s own bookmarks, naming each part after its bookmark. Useful for a report whose chapters are already marked.
- Split PDF by textStart a new file at every page containing a phrase — “Invoice”, “Statement of account”, a customer number. It reads the page’s text layer, so it cannot split a scan that has never been through OCR.
- Extract PDF pagesPull a page range out into a new document, leaving the original alone.
- Delete PDF pagesRemove a page range and keep the rest. Deleting every page is refused rather than silently producing an empty file.
Make a file smaller or a scan straighter
The upload limit said 10 MB, or the scanner fed the pages in at an angle.
- Compress PDFMake a PDF smaller by re-encoding the images inside it, leaving text sharp. The result says how much it saved, so you can decide whether it was worth it.
- Deskew PDFStraighten pages that were scanned at an angle, by finding the tilt of the text lines and rotating the page back. It works on the rendered page, so the output is images.
- OCR PDFReport which pages have a real text layer and which are images that would need OCR. Full OCR needs Tesseract, which is not installed on this deployment — the report tells you exactly which pages would need it.
Get the contents out of a PDF
The words, the tables or the pictures, in a format something else can open.
- PDF to WordProduce a Word-openable document that keeps paragraphs and headings. It is not a true .docx converter: complex layouts, tables and columns will not survive, and the tool says so on every run.
- PDF to ExcelDetect tables by the position of the text and export them as CSV, which every spreadsheet opens. Ruled tables convert well; text laid out in columns without a table does not.
- PDF to textExtract the text layer as a plain text file, optionally keeping the page layout. A scanned page has no text layer, so it comes out empty — check with the OCR tool first.
- PDF to JPGRender each page to a JPEG or PNG at the resolution you choose. One image per page, zipped.
- PDF to PowerPointTurn each page into a slide-sized image with an index, for dropping into a deck. It does not produce editable slides.
- Extract images from PDFPull the images out of a PDF at their original resolution, skipping the tiny ones that are usually rules and bullets.
Make a PDF out of something else
Photos, a text file or a web page that has to arrive as a PDF.
- JPG to PDFTurn images into a PDF, one page per image, in the order you arrange them. JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP and WebP are accepted.
- Word to PDFConvert plain text, Markdown or HTML to a PDF. A real .docx needs a word processor to render it, which this deployment does not have — the tool tells you rather than producing something wrong.
- HTML to PDFConvert an HTML file to a PDF, keeping headings, paragraphs, lists and links. It does not run CSS or JavaScript, so a page that depends on layout styling will not look like it does in a browser.
Fix how the pages sit on the paper
Sideways, off-centre, the wrong size, or four pages that should print on one sheet.
- Rotate PDFTurn pages 90, 180 or 270 degrees, all of them or a range. The rotation is stored in the page, so nothing is re-rendered and nothing is lost.
- Flip PDF pagesMirror pages horizontally or vertically — for a scan made through the back of a page, or artwork that needs reversing for print.
- Crop PDFTrim margins by setting how much to take off each side. Cropping hides the margin rather than deleting it, so the content is still there if you crop back.
- Resize PDF pagesScale pages onto a standard paper size — A4, Letter, Legal — keeping the proportions and centring the content.
- N-up PDFPut several pages on one sheet — 2, 4, 6, 8, 9 or 16 — for handouts and proof prints.
- Greyscale PDFConvert pages to greyscale, for cheaper printing or a scan that came out with a colour cast. The pages are re-rendered as images, so the text stops being selectable — that is the trade-off of doing it reliably.
Put something on every page
Numbering and marks that have to be identical on every page and never repeat.
- Add page numbers to PDFStamp page numbers where you want them, starting from any number, in the format you choose — 1, Page 1, or 1 of N.
- Add header and footer to PDFPut a line of text at the top or bottom of every page, with tokens for the page number, the total, the file name and today’s date.
- Bates numberingStamp sequential Bates numbers with a prefix, suffix and fixed width — the identifiers a court or a disclosure exercise expects, one per page, never repeated.
- Watermark PDFStamp text across the pages — DRAFT, CONFIDENTIAL, a name — at the size, colour, angle and opacity you choose.
Control what can be done with the file
A password to add or drop, or values that should be readable but no longer editable.
- Password protect PDFAdd a password and choose what may still be done with the file — printing, copying, changing. The permissions are a request the reader honours, not a lock: only the password actually stops someone opening it.
- Unlock PDFRemove the password from a PDF you can already open, so you stop typing it. This is not password cracking: if you do not know the password, this tool cannot help you.
- Flatten PDFTurn form fields — and optionally annotations — into ordinary page content, so the values can be read but no longer edited. Flattening cannot be undone in the file itself, so keep the original.
Tidy up the document itself
The properties, the outline, the leftover comments and the file that will not open.
- Edit PDF metadataChange the title, author, subject and keywords a PDF reports — the fields a document management system indexes and a reader shows in Properties.
- Create PDF bookmarksBuild an outline from the document’s headings, its pages, or text you match — so a long report gets a navigable table of contents.
- Remove annotations from PDFStrip comments, highlights, links or form fields. Useful before sending a document out, when the margin notes were for you.
- Repair PDFRebuild a damaged PDF page by page and report what could not be recovered. It cannot invent data that is missing from the file, so a truncated download stays truncated.
- Rename PDFGive the file a new name and, if you like, set the document title to match — so it shows up correctly in a reader’s title bar and in search results.