How to work with PDFs without Adobe Acrobat

Most PDF jobs are small: put three files together, pull out two pages, turn a stack of photos into one document, produce something printable. None of that needs installed software, and none of it needs to leave your computer.

Here is what a browser can do, and, more usefully, what it cannot.

The four browser tools this site ships for these jobs (merge, split, images to PDF and compress) are collected on the documents hub, beside the text tools.

Can I merge or split PDFs in a browser?

A PDF is a container of pages. Merging copies pages from several containers into a new one; splitting copies a subset into a smaller one. Both operations move the page objects as they are, so text stays selectable, images keep their resolution, and nothing is re-compressed.

That also means mixed page sizes survive. An A4 cover letter followed by an A3 drawing stays exactly that.

Two things do not survive here: form fields and digital signatures. A signature covers a specific document, and the merged file is a different document, so no tool can carry it over. That is mathematics, not a limitation of the software.

• Merge PDF for combining, with reordering
• Split PDF for extracting ranges

How do I turn images into one PDF?

Scans, receipts and screenshots usually arrive as separate images and need to be one document. Images to PDF embeds JPEG and PNG data directly, without re-encoding, so quality is untouched and the file ends up roughly the size of the images together.

The page size choice matters more than it looks. Fitting each page to its image is right for anything read on screen. A4 or Letter with a margin is right for anything printed or uploaded to a form, because a form that expects a page and receives a 4000 by 3000 pixel page will do something unhelpful with it.

If the result is too heavy to email, resize the images to about 3500 pixels on the long side first. That is A4 at 300 DPI, about the most a printed page can show.

How do I create a PDF from scratch?

The shortest reliable route is the one built into your operating system: print, then pick “Save as PDF” as the destination. On Windows, macOS, Linux and Android that is a choice in the print dialog. On an iPhone or iPad there is no such choice; the route is a gesture: spread two fingers over the print preview, and the page becomes a PDF you save from the share sheet. Every current browser on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS can do it, and you get the exact page size your system uses.

That is how the invoice generator works. It renders the document as a page and lets your browser write the PDF, which is more reliable than generating one in JavaScript and produces a smaller, properly sized file.

Which PDF jobs still need real software?

Being honest about the boundary is more useful than pretending there isn’t one.

Optical character recognition. Turning a scanned page into searchable text needs a real OCR engine. Browser-based OCR exists and is slow and mediocre for anything but clean, straight, high-contrast scans.

Shrinking a PDF that must stay text. Making a scanned PDF smaller is a browser job now: Compress PDF re-encodes the page images to a size cap without uploading, and a scan has no text to lose. What still needs desktop software is shrinking a text PDF while keeping the words selectable: the browser route rebuilds each page as an image, the right trade for a scan and the wrong one for a document whose text must stay text.

Editing existing text. A PDF stores positioned glyphs, not paragraphs. Changing a sentence means reflowing everything after it, which is why “PDF editors” either approximate it or convert to another format and back.

Real redaction. Covering text with a black box is drawing, not removing. Proper redaction deletes the underlying content, and you should verify afterwards by trying to select the text.

For those four, use proper software. For the other ninety percent of PDF work, a browser is faster, and the file never leaves your machine.

What should I check before sending a PDF?

Ask what a PDF contains before you send it. A merged bundle of documents carries every page you added, including the one you meant to remove, and the metadata of whichever tool made it. The tools here clear the producer and creator fields when writing a file, which is a small thing that costs nothing and occasionally saves an awkward conversation.