Cookies for analytics and advertising
We use cookies for analytics and advertising, both sent to Google. Refusing changes nothing you can see.Read the privacy page
PDF converter
PDF is the format people use for the documents they least want to hand to a stranger: contracts, invoices, medical letters, tax returns. Everything on this page that can run in your browser does, which for this category is the point rather than a convenience. Drop a file and you are shown what can be done with it.
Up to 100 files at once. Mixed formats are fine.
They convert one after another and download together as a ZIP.
Every PDF format we handle
1 formats in this category, 35 working conversions — 16 of them without your file leaving the device.
Tools for PDF converter files
Somebody assembling one document out of several — a signed contract and its annexes, scanned pages that arrived separately, an application that has to be submitted as a single file.
Somebody with one file that should be several — a scan of twelve receipts that has to be submitted one at a time, or a long report whose chapters go to different people.
Somebody who needs part of a document and not the rest — one page of a contract to send on, or the three pages of a long report that are actually relevant.
Somebody tidying a document before sending it — blank pages from a scanner, a cover sheet, an internal note that should not go out.
Somebody with a scan that came out sideways or upside down, usually from a document feeder that took some sheets the wrong way round.
PDF converter
Out of a PDF, and into one
Turning a PDF into images renders each page at a resolution you choose — 150 DPI looks right on screen, 300 is for printing, and past that the file grows faster than it improves. Turning one into text extracts the text the file already carries, in the order it stores it, which is instant and exact for a PDF written by software.
A scan is the exception, and it is worth knowing before you try: a scanned document contains no text at all, only a picture of one. Extracting text from it needs character recognition, which this site does on images rather than on PDFs — render the scan to PNG here first and put those pages through the OCR conversion. We say so when it happens rather than handing you an empty file.
Going the other way, images become PDF pages and office documents are rendered by the same engine a desktop suite uses. Those last ones are among the few conversions here that touch our server, because no browser can host that engine — and each page says which kind it is before you start.
Making a PDF smaller
Compressing a PDF is three different jobs depending on what the document is made of, and a tool with one slider is picking for you. Re-encoding the embedded photographs keeps the text selectable and is nearly always the right choice. Rewriting the structure losslessly changes nothing at all. Rasterising produces the smallest file and turns the text into a picture permanently, which is right for a scan and wrong for almost everything else.
Whether your PDF holds text or a picture of text
This single question decides which of the tools below will work, and it takes three seconds to answer. Open the file and try to select a line with the mouse. If words highlight word by word, the text is really in there. If a rectangle highlights over the whole area, the page is an image.
A PDF built from a document — exported from a word processor, printed to PDF, generated by a system — is the first kind, and text can be pulled straight out of it. A PDF built from a scanner or a phone photograph is the second, and no extraction tool can find words that were never written as words. That case needs OCR, which recognises characters rather than reading them, and is a separate tool on this site.
Fonts are why the file looks the same on every machine
A PDF usually carries the fonts it needs inside itself, which is the whole reason the format took over from sending documents around and hoping. The recipient does not need the typeface installed, and the line breaks land where the author put them.
It is also why PDFs are larger than the documents they came from, and why one built by a system that skipped embedding can look wrong on a machine missing the font. If a PDF renders with different spacing on someone else's screen, an unembedded font is nearly always the reason.
The two different things called a protected PDF
The first is a password required to open the file. Without it the contents are encrypted and unreadable by anything, including every tool here — there is no way around that short of the password, and that is the point of it.
The second is a permissions flag inside a file that opens perfectly well, asking applications to disallow printing, copying or editing. It is a request rather than encryption, and the content sits in the clear behind it. Whether you may act on that is a question about the document and the person who sent it, not about the software.
PDF converter: common questions
Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?
Not for the conversions that run in your browser, which is most of them — the file never leaves your device. The exceptions are the office-document conversions, which need an engine no browser can run; those are processed and their working directory deleted as soon as the result has been read. Each page says which kind it is before you begin.
Can I get editable text out of a scanned PDF?
Not in one step. A scan is a picture of a page rather than words, so there is no text to extract — that needs optical character recognition, which runs here on images and not on PDFs. Convert the scan to PNG first and read those. A PDF written by software rather than scanned extracts perfectly.
Can I compress a PDF without losing quality?
Yes — the lossless tier rewrites the file structure and changes nothing inside it. The saving is modest, typically a few per cent, and sometimes nothing at all, in which case you get the original back rather than a larger file.
Why will my password-protected PDF not convert?
Because it cannot be read without the password, so there is nothing to work on. Open it in a PDF reader with the password, save an unprotected copy, and convert that. We name this case specifically rather than failing with a generic error.