PDF guides
Plain-English how-tos and explainers for everyday PDF tasks — and how doing them in your browser keeps your documents private.
These guides exist because the same questions keep arriving by email, and because most of what is written about PDFs online is either a vendor pitch or a rewrite of somebody else’s blog post. Each one covers a task people genuinely get stuck on — compressing a file that refuses to shrink, making a scan searchable, working out whether an online tool is safe to paste a contract into — and explains what is actually happening rather than listing steps.
They are written by the person who built the tools, which means they include the parts a marketing page leaves out: where a technique fails, when the honest answer is that a file cannot be made smaller without losing something, and which limits are imposed by the PDF format itself rather than by the software.
- Are online PDF tools safe? How client-side processing protects your filesServer-side vs client-side PDF tools, what actually happens to your files, and how to check a tool is not uploading them.
- How to reduce a PDF’s file size for email, forms and uploadsWhat makes PDFs heavy, the two ways to compress them, and how to hit a strict size limit without ruining quality.
- How to make a scanned PDF searchable: OCR explainedWhat OCR is, how it adds a searchable text layer to a scan, and how to get accurate results.
- PDF to Markdown: turn documents into clean text for notes, wikis and AIWhy Markdown matters, how a PDF is turned into structured Markdown, and when to check the result.
- How to password-protect a PDF — and safely remove a passwordPDF encryption explained: AES-256, open passwords vs permissions, and doing it without uploading.
- How to merge, split and reorganize PDF pagesCombining, extracting, reordering, rotating and deleting pages — the right tool for each task.
- Converting between images and PDF: JPG/PNG to PDF and backImages to PDF and PDF to images: choosing JPG vs PNG, resolution, page size and use cases.
- Smart vs extreme PDF compression: which to chooseThe trade-off between keeping text selectable and reaching a small size, explained clearly.