File & PDF Tools

PDFs are where the most sensitive files in daily life end up: bank statements, tenancy agreements, degree certificates, medical results, tax returns and job applications. That makes the usual advice to just use a free online PDF site genuinely risky, because almost all of them work by sending your document to a server. The seven tools collected here do the same jobs without that step. The PDF Workspace merges several files into one, splits a long document into parts, reorders or deletes pages and reduces file size. The Document Scanner turns photos taken with your phone camera into a clean, straightened multi-page PDF. The PDF to Word Converter pulls editable text out of a PDF. The Grayscale Converter strips colour so printing costs less. The PDF Info Viewer shows page count, dimensions, and metadata without opening the file in a heavy desktop application. Image to PDF and Text to PDF handle the two most common ways of creating a PDF from scratch.

If you are starting from paper, begin with the Document Scanner: photograph each page, let the tool correct the edges and contrast, and export a single PDF. If you are starting from pictures already on your phone, Image to PDF is faster. When you have several separate PDF files that a portal wants as one upload, use the PDF Workspace merge mode, and use its compress mode afterwards if the combined file exceeds the size limit. Split mode is the one to reach for when only pages three to seven of a long report are relevant. If you need to change wording rather than just rearrange pages, run the PDF to Word Converter first and edit the result in Word or Google Docs. Before a large print job, the Grayscale Converter is worth a moment: a colour document printed in black and white at a shop often costs several times more per page than a document that is already grayscale.

These tools rely on two well-established open source libraries, pdf.js for reading PDF structure and rendering pages, and canvas-based rendering for writing new files. Both are loaded into your browser from a pinned content delivery network version and then execute on your own device. When you select a file, the browser hands the tool a reference to that file in local memory; the pages are parsed, changed and re-assembled there, and the finished document is offered back to you as a normal browser download. No network request carries your document, which is why the tools keep working with your connection switched off. It also means speed depends on your device rather than on server queues, so a fifty page merge that would take a busy web service a minute usually finishes in a few seconds here.