Merge, split and compress PDFs without uploading them

Merge PDF offline: what changes compared with the usual websites

Search for “merge PDF” and you get a dozen services that all work the same way behind the scenes: they receive your document, store it on a server, process it and hand you a download link that expires in a few hours. They work — the price is that your file spent time outside your control. Here that step simply does not exist. When you drop a PDF on the zone, the browser reads it from disk and keeps it in memory; the result is assembled on your machine and lands in your downloads folder. At no point is there a network request carrying your document anywhere.

Split PDF without uploading, by ranges or page by page

Splitting is the operation most often misunderstood, so there are three ways to do it here, all working from the same document. First, ranges: type 1-3, 5, 8- and you get three documents — the first three pages, page five, and page eight to the end. Second, one page per file, handy when a batch of receipts has to be handed out individually. Third, extract the selection: tick the thumbnails you want, however scattered they are, and get a new PDF with exactly those pages in the order shown. When the result is several documents they are packed into a single .zip so there is only one download.

Compress PDF privately: when it works and when it doesn't

This deserves honesty, because almost no website explains it. Genuinely compressing a PDF means re-encoding its contents, and PDF contents come in two very different flavours. If the document is a scan or full of photographs, the weight lives in the images, and re-encoding them at lower quality and lower resolution shrinks the file dramatically — cuts of 70% or more are routine, and the result still reads perfectly.

If the document is plain text out of a word processor, the opposite is true: that text already occupies almost nothing, and turning it into images makes the file heavier while destroying the text layer — no more searching, selecting or copying. So when the tool detects a text-heavy document it warns you before touching anything and lets you decide. And if the compressed result still ends up larger than the original, it is discarded and the original is kept.

The quality and resolution controls do different jobs and it pays to know which is which: quality governs how much detail is thrown away inside each image, while resolution (dpi) decides how many pixels the page has at all. For reading on screen, 96 or 120 dpi is plenty. For home printing, 150 dpi. For a print shop, 300 dpi.

Rotate, reorder and delete pages

Everything you load becomes a single list of page thumbnails, and that list is the document. Dragging a thumbnail moves it; on a phone, the arrows on each card do the same thing without a fight. The two rotate buttons turn the page 90 degrees each way and the thumbnail is re-rendered so you see exactly what you will get. The cross deletes that page, and if you would rather work in bulk you can select several and use “delete pages”. None of this touches the original file on your disk — it only changes the working document that gets built when you download.

PDF to images, and images to PDF

Pages can be exported as PNG, which keeps every pixel intact and suits screenshots, diagrams and anything headed for print, or as JPG, far lighter and perfectly good for photographs and scans. Export more than one page and they arrive together in a .zip, numbered in order.

The other direction is just as direct: drag in JPG, PNG or WebP files and each becomes a page of the document, in whatever order you set with the thumbnails. It is the fastest way to turn six photos of receipts into a presentable PDF.

Page numbers and watermarks

Numbering goes in any of the six usual positions, can start at whatever number you like — useful when the document continues another one — and comes in three formats: the bare number, “1 of 10”, or the number between dashes. The watermark is free text set diagonally, with adjustable size, opacity and tilt, applied to every page on download. Both are applied at the moment the file is generated, so you can turn them on, look at the result and change your mind without redoing anything.

The limits, stated before they bite

Working in the browser has a real ceiling: your device's memory. On a reasonable computer the tool is comfortable up to about 100 MB and 500 pages; beyond that it can get slow, and on a phone the margin is considerably tighter. Password-protected PDFs cannot be opened until the protection is removed, and the tool says exactly that. Watermarks and page numbers use the PDF format's standard font, which covers the full Latin alphabet including accents but not scripts such as Cyrillic or Chinese. And compressing a text document, as said above, turns it into images.