Category · 13 tools
Free PDF tools for everyday documents
PDF is the format the world agrees on — contracts, invoices, scans, lecture notes and boarding passes all arrive as PDFs. It keeps layout intact, which is exactly why it is so awkward to edit. These tools take the friction out of everyday PDF work: pull the text or images out, rebuild a PDF from other files, combine a stack of documents, or make a file small enough to email.
Every PDF tool here runs locally in your browser. Your document is read by the tab you are looking at, not uploaded to a server, and nothing is kept after you close the page. That makes these tools safe for invoices, ID scans and anything else you would rather not hand to an anonymous website.
In this category
Convert, merge, split and shrink PDFs
Which PDF tool do I actually need?
PDF problems fall into three groups: getting content out, getting content in, and making the file smaller or more manageable. If you need the words, use PDF to text for copy or PDF to Word when the result must look like a document. If you need pictures, use PDF to JPG. If you are building a PDF, JPG to PDF handles images and Word to PDF handles documents. Merge, split and compress are filing jobs — they rearrange or shrink existing pages without changing their content.
It helps to know what kind of PDF you have. A text-based PDF (exported from Word, Google Docs, InDesign or LaTeX) contains selectable text and converts cleanly. A scanned PDF is a picture of a page: the tools can extract or render it, but without OCR there is no text to recover. Password-protected PDFs must be unlocked before any conversion, and encrypted files intentionally cannot be read by these tools.
- Sending a document by email
- Compress first; if the recipient needs to edit it, PDF to Word gives them a working copy.
- Combining a scanned form and a signature page
- Merge PDF keeps page order and original quality — no re-rendering, no re-compression.
- Pulling quotes into a report
- PDF to text is faster than copying from a viewer and keeps paragraph breaks readable.
Guides for PDF Tools
All guidesThe format background, trade-offs and failure modes behind these tools — written for people who want to know why a conversion works the way it does.