Free PDF tools that never
touch a server

Everything a PDF actually needs, in one place

The PDF format turns thirty-two this year, and it has outlived nearly every rival because of one stubborn property: a PDF looks the same everywhere. The fonts travel inside the file, the layout is fixed in absolute coordinates, and a page rendered in Kathmandu is identical to the same page rendered in Toronto. That reliability is why governments, courts, banks and universities standardised on it, and why it remains the format you are asked for whenever a document has to be treated as a record rather than a draft.

The trade-off is that a PDF is deliberately difficult to change. It was designed as a finished artefact — the digital equivalent of printed paper — and the software that edits one properly has traditionally been expensive. That gap is what this site fills. Not a full editor, but a complete set of the practical operations people genuinely need: combining documents, pulling pages out, dropping pages, fixing a sideways scan, getting a file under an upload limit, turning pages into images, signing something without owning a printer.

The jobs these tools were built around

Almost every visitor arrives with one of a small number of problems. A form will only accept one file and you have six. A portal refuses anything over 2 MB and your scan is 14. A phone camera captured a document sideways. A twenty-page report needs to become the four pages you actually want to send. Someone needs a signature by this evening and there is no printer in the building. Each tool here exists because that specific situation is common enough to deserve a page that does one thing properly.

Where a job needs more than one step, the tools chain together cleanly. Photographs of a document become a PDF with JPG to PDF, get straightened with Rotate PDF, are combined with a covering letter using Merge PDF, and are brought under the size limit with Compress PDF. Four steps, four minutes, nothing installed and nothing uploaded.

How the tools work under the hood

Two open-source libraries do the heavy lifting, both running as ordinary JavaScript in your browser. pdf-lib reads and rewrites PDF structure — it is what copies pages between documents, applies rotations, stamps text and adjusts metadata. PDF.js, the rendering engine Mozilla built for Firefox's built-in PDF viewer, draws pages to a canvas; that is what makes the page thumbnails, the image exports and the compressor possible.

Your browser is genuinely capable of this work. The same engine that runs video calls and online spreadsheets has no difficulty rewriting a few megabytes of document structure. The only real limit is memory, which is why an unusually large scanned file may struggle on an older phone but is untroubled on a laptop.

Who builds this

SantoshTec is run by Santosh Khatiwada, an independent software developer in Nepal who also builds payroll and accounting systems for local organisations. The tools here came out of that work: preparing document packs for submission was a recurring chore, the available online tools all wanted to upload client files to servers in other countries, and desktop software was priced for enterprises. Building a browser-local version was the honest fix. If something is broken or missing, tell me — the list of tools has grown almost entirely from requests.