PDF Tools
Every PDF Tools tool on Toolz.dev: 14 free utilities that run entirely in your browser. No signup, no uploads, no downloads.
A PDF tool changes the structure of a PDF file: which pages it contains, what order they sit in, which way up they face, and how many of them land on a printed sheet. The fourteen tools here all work at that level. None of them rewrites the words inside a page, because a PDF stores a page as drawing instructions rather than as an editable document, and rewriting those instructions is what a PDF editor does rather than what a page tool does.
Most jobs come down to one of three verbs. To make one file out of several, merge PDF files in the order you drop them, or interleave two PDFs when you have scanned the fronts and backs of a stack separately. To make several files out of one, split the PDF by page ranges, or extract just the pages you need into a new document. To fix a file you already have, organize the pages - reorder, rotate, duplicate and delete in one pass - which is usually faster than running three single-purpose tools in sequence.
Which PDF tool does which job
| If you need to | Use | What it does to the file |
|---|---|---|
| Combine several files | Merge PDF | Copies every page into one document, in your order |
| Interleave two scans | Alternate Mix Pages | Takes pages from each file in turn, front then back |
| Break one file up | Split PDF | Writes one new document per page range |
| Pull out a few pages | Extract PDF Pages | Copies the selected pages into a single new file |
| Drop pages you do not want | Delete PDF Pages | Removes them and keeps everything else intact |
| Clean up after a scanner | Remove Blank Pages | Detects near-empty pages and drops them |
| Reorder, rotate and delete at once | Organize PDF | All page edits in one pass, with a page grid |
| Fix sideways pages | Rotate PDF Pages | Turns pages 90, 180 or 270 degrees |
| Put the last page first | Reverse PDF Page Order | Reverses the whole page sequence |
| Add a page for notes | Add Blank Page to PDF | Inserts an empty page at any position |
| Save paper | N-Up PDF | Places 2, 4, 6 or 9 pages on each sheet |
| Print something wall-sized | Posterize PDF | Splits each page across several sheets to tile |
| Get one tall image-like page | Combine to Single Page | Stacks every page into one continuous page |
| Shrink the file | Compress PDF | Repacks the structure and drops unused objects |
What page-level editing can and cannot do
Every tool here copies whole pages between documents rather than redrawing them. That is the reason text stays selectable and searchable after a merge, fonts stay embedded, links and bookmarks inside a page survive, and nothing is resampled or blurred. It is also the reason none of these tools can change a sentence, replace a logo or fill in a form field: the page arrives as a finished drawing and leaves as the same finished drawing, in a different position.
The distinction matters most with scanned documents. A scan is a photograph of a page wrapped in a PDF, so it has no text at all until optical character recognition adds a layer. You can still reorder it, rotate it or delete its pages, because those are page operations. You cannot search it, and compression will barely touch it, because the bulk of the file is the photograph.
Why compressing a PDF sometimes changes nothing
PDF compression comes in two kinds and only one of them is safe. Structural compression repacks the file, writes objects into compressed streams and discards anything nothing references. It is lossless, so text stays sharp and images keep every pixel, and it is what the PDF compressor here does. Image recompression re-encodes the pictures at a lower quality, which is where a service promising to shrink a scan by eighty percent gets its number, and where the visible degradation comes from.
So the honest answer to a file that will not shrink is that its size is in its images. A text-heavy report with years of accumulated revision overhead can lose a useful fraction. A forty-page scan will not, because forty photographs are still forty photographs after repacking. The saving there comes from removing pages, and extracting only the pages you need usually beats any compression setting.
The tools that exist because of paper
Four of these tools only make sense at a printer. N-up printing puts several pages on one sheet, which turns a 40-page deck into 10 sheets at 4-up and is the single easiest way to cut a print job. Posterizing does the opposite: it splits one large page across a grid of ordinary sheets you tape together, which is how you get an A0 plan out of an A4 printer. Reversing the page order fixes a printer that stacks output face-up. And combining every page into one long page produces a file that scrolls continuously rather than paginates, which is what you want when the destination is a screen rather than a tray.
All of it runs client-side. The file is opened in your browser with the pdf-lib library, edited in memory and handed back as a download, so a document never leaves your device, is never queued on a server and is not subject to a third-party retention policy. Encrypted files are the one exception to what will open: a password-protected PDF has to be unlocked in the application that made it before any page tool can read it.
Frequently asked questions
- Are my PDF files uploaded to a server?
- No. Every PDF tool here runs client-side, in your browser, using the pdf-lib library. The file is read from your disk into memory, edited there and written back out as a download. Nothing is transmitted, stored or logged, and the pages keep working with the network disconnected.
- Can I edit the text inside a PDF with these tools?
- No. A PDF stores each page as a set of drawing instructions rather than as editable text, so changing a word means redrawing the page. These tools work at the page level - add, remove, reorder, rotate, split, merge - and copy each page across unchanged, which is what keeps text sharp and fonts intact.
- Why did compressing my PDF barely reduce the size?
- Because the file is mostly images. The compressor repacks the document structure and drops unreferenced objects, which is lossless, but it does not re-encode pictures. A scanned document is a stack of photographs, so its size stays roughly the same. Removing pages you do not need saves far more on a scan than any compression level.
- How large a PDF can these tools handle?
- As large as your browser has memory for, which in practice is a few hundred megabytes on a desktop and less on a phone. There is no server-side upload limit because there is no upload. Very large files are slowest to open, not to edit, since the whole document is parsed before the first page appears.
- Do these tools work on a password-protected PDF?
- No. An encrypted PDF cannot be parsed without its password, so it fails to open rather than failing partway through. Remove the protection in the application that created the file, or in a PDF reader that can save an unprotected copy, then run the page tool on that copy.
- Do I need an account to use the PDF tools?
- No. Every PDF tool on this page is free, no signup, with no watermark added to the output and no daily file cap of the kind server-based converters use to ration processing. The reason is structural: the processing happens on your device, so there is no per-file cost to meter.