PDF tools

PDF is the default format for contracts, invoices, forms and e-books, which is exactly why it can be frustrating to work with: it is designed to look the same everywhere, not to be edited. This section gathers the everyday jobs people need to do with PDFs. You can merge several files into one, split a long document into parts, delete pages you do not need, rotate pages that were scanned upside down, and stamp a text watermark across a document before you share it.

For conversions, there are tools that pull the content of a PDF into Word, Excel or Markdown, and others that go the other way, turning Word documents, Excel sheets and images into PDF. You can also render a thumbnail of the first page, and run OCR on scanned PDFs to recover selectable Arabic or English text.

These tools run in your browser using libraries such as pdf.js and pdf-lib, so your files are not uploaded to a server. Keep expectations realistic: PDF to Word extracts the text rather than rebuilding complex layouts, and compression works best on image-heavy files. Pick a tool below; all of them are free and need no account.