PDF Tools
Merge, split, and rotate unencrypted PDF documents locally, with explicit file and page limits and no uploads.
Start from what the document has to become
- Merge PDF
- Several files have to arrive as one — scans of a single contract, chapters, an expense claim.
- Split PDF
- You need a few pages out of something long, or one file has to become several.
- Rotate PDF
- A scanner produced pages lying sideways or upside down.
- Markdown to PDF
- Notes or a README have to leave as something a person can print or attach.
What a PDF really is, and what survives an edit
A PDF is not a document in the sense a word processor means. It is a container of page objects, each one a set of drawing instructions plus the fonts and images those instructions reference. That is why merging is fast and lossless: page objects are copied across, nothing is re-laid-out, and text stays text rather than becoming a picture of text. It is also why the things that live outside the pages do not come along. An outline, internal links, form fields, and annotations belong to the document rather than to a page, and they do not survive the copy.
The limits follow from the same fact. An encrypted or password-protected file cannot be opened without the password, so it is refused rather than half-processed. A scanned document is a PDF full of images, and no amount of splitting turns those images into words — there is no text recognition here, and a page that looks like text to you may hold none at all. Rotation is written as a page attribute, so it is exact and costs nothing; the pixels are not touched.
The Markdown converter is the odd one out and worth knowing about: it lays text out into real A4 page boxes in the browser and prints from there, so it produces a document rather than a screenshot. If what you need is text pulled out of a PDF, a signature added to one, or a scan turned into words, none of these does it, and it is better to hear that here than after uploading a contract somewhere.
Frequently asked questions about PDF Tools
Can I open a password-protected PDF?
No. An encrypted file is refused rather than partly processed, and no password is asked for. This is a boundary rather than an omission: prompting for one would mean handling a credential the tool has no business holding. Remove the protection in the program that applied it, then come back.
Can I get the text out of a PDF?
No. There is no text extraction and no recognition of scanned pages here. A scan is a stack of images, and turning images into words takes an OCR engine — a large dependency, and a slow one. What these do is rearrange pages, which is a different job entirely.
What gets lost when files are merged?
Page content survives exactly: text, images, vectors, fonts. What does not is everything attached to the document rather than to a page — the outline, internal links between pages, form fields, and annotations. If the source files carry a table of contents you rely on, check the merged file before sending it.
Will the merged file be smaller than the parts?
Slightly, and not enough to plan around. Merging removes duplicated document structure and can share a font that appears in more than one source, but page content is copied as it stands and nothing is recompressed. Expect roughly the sum of the inputs.