Frequently asked questions

Correct. Every tool processes your file inside your browser using your device's own resources. Nothing is transmitted to a server. You can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and most tools will still work.

Yes. All tools are free to use with no daily limits, no sign-up, and no watermarks added to your files.

No. There is no sign-up and no login. Just open a tool and use it.

Compression mainly shrinks embedded images. If your PDF is already mostly text, or its images are already efficiently stored, there may be little to compress. In that case the tool returns your original unchanged rather than giving you a larger file.

No. The compressor only downsamples images; text and vector graphics are left untouched and stay sharp and selectable. (Scanned documents are entirely images, so those will lose some image detail — that is the trade-off for a smaller size.)

The target-size tool gets as close as possible under your chosen limit. For one or two scanned pages this usually works; very long or text-only documents may not reach a tiny target without removing pages.

Yes — because the encryption and signing happen on your device and the file is never uploaded. That makes local tools a good fit for sensitive documents. Keep your password safe, though: an encrypted PDF generally cannot be opened if the password is lost.

No. Pages are copied exactly into the new document, so there is no re-compression or quality loss.

Modern versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari. Some advanced tools perform best on the latest browser versions.

Yes. The tools work in mobile browsers with no app to install. Very large files may be slow on older phones due to limited memory.

Nothing leaves your device, and once you close or refresh the tab, the file is gone from the browser's memory. We never receive or store it.

Not currently. High-quality conversion to editable Office formats is difficult to do well in the browser, so we focus on the tasks we can do privately and reliably.

Most online PDF converters upload your file to a remote server, which means a copy of your document exists on hardware you don't control. CorePDFTools works differently: every operation runs inside your own browser tab, using your device's processor and memory. Your file is never transmitted anywhere.

It depends entirely on where the processing happens. Server-based tools usually write a temporary copy to disk, and you have to trust their retention policy. CorePDFTools performs every operation locally in JavaScript, so there is no upload and no temporary server copy to worry about.

With conventional converters, your file is typically held in cloud storage while it is processed and deleted some time afterwards. CorePDFTools never uploads your file in the first place, so no copy is ever created on any server.

Use CorePDFTools. Every tool — merge, split, rotate, organize, convert, compress, protect, sign, watermark, page numbers, grayscale and OCR — runs in browser memory using self-hosted libraries. No part of your document is sent over the internet.

Any tool that uploads your file creates the possibility of retention, interception or misuse, however remote. Client-side tools remove that risk category entirely, because there is nothing to intercept — the document never leaves your machine.

Open the Protect PDF tool, choose a strong password and download the result. The encryption is applied by your own browser. Note that the encryption strength depends on the PDF's internal version: modern PDFs (1.6 and above) get AES, while older PDFs (1.4 and earlier) fall back to the legacy RC4 scheme that the format defines for them.

Load your document into Protect PDF, enter your password, and click encrypt. The locked file is built on your device — no desktop software and no upload required. Keep the password somewhere safe; an encrypted PDF cannot be recovered without it.

CorePDFTools offers free, unlimited PDF password protection with no daily caps and no registration.

The Protect tool applies the PDF standard security handler using the encryption level that matches your file's PDF version. PDFs at version 1.7 extension level 3 get AES-256, versions 1.6 and 1.7 get AES-128, and older versions fall back to RC4 as the format specifies. If you need guaranteed AES, save or export your source document as PDF 1.6 or newer before protecting it. Password protection is a deterrent, not a substitute for proper document security.

Use a client-side PDF processor. Once the CorePDFTools page and its libraries have loaded in your tab, the tools continue to work even if you disconnect from the internet for the rest of that session.

UPSC, TNPSC, MPSC (Maharashtra), BPSC, APPSC (Andhra), TGPSC (Telangana), KPSC (Karnataka), Kerala PSC, OPSC (Odisha), HPSC (Haryana), HPPSC (Himachal), PPSC (Punjab), UPPSC (Uttar Pradesh), GPSC (Gujarat), RPSC (Rajasthan), JPSC (Jharkhand), plus GATE, NEET, JEE, SSC, RRB and IBPS PO. Each has its own page because each has its own limits.

Because we quote the commission's own document and link to it, and a lot of what circulates is copied from older cycles or from a generic banking template. Jharkhand is the clearest case: the figure published almost everywhere is 15 to 25 KB for the photograph, while the JPSC portal states 10 to 200 KB. Every page here shows its source so you can check rather than trust us.

No, and assuming they do is the most common way an upload gets rejected. Andhra asks for 50 KB, Telangana 4 to 50 KB, Maharashtra a 50 KB maximum, Jharkhand 10 to 200 KB. Dimensions, formats and minimums differ too. A file prepared for one commission will often fail at another.

It depends on the commission. Telangana, Andhra, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Tripura use a one-time registration where the photo and signature sit in your profile and populate into every later application. Others take the upload per application. Where it is one-time, getting it right matters more, because the same file follows you.

The upload is rejected exactly as if the file were too large. Telangana sets 4 KB for the photograph and 1 KB for the signature; Jharkhand sets 10 KB and 4 KB. Compressing as hard as possible is a real way to fail a form that has a floor.

Odisha and Rajasthan require a thumb impression as a third upload. Telangana requires certificates uploaded into the profile. UPSC, KPSC, NEET and JEE take document or certificate uploads with their own limits. Tripura asks for a thumb impression as well, which almost no other site mentions.

Andhra Pradesh PSC and Jharkhand PSC both require the candidate's name and the date the photograph was taken to appear on the image itself. Our tools for those two print the text into the file rather than leaving you to do it in an image editor.

Yes — Bihar. BPSC captures the photograph live through a webcam during the application, so there is no photo file to prepare. That is why there is a BPSC signature tool here but no BPSC photo tool.

These collisions are real and they cost people applications. MPSC is Maharashtra; MPPSC is Madhya Pradesh. APPSC is used by both Andhra Pradesh (psc.ap.gov.in) and Arunachal Pradesh (appsc.gov.in), with completely different specifications. TGPSC was called TSPSC until 2024. JPSC is Jharkhand's Public Service Commission, not JSSC, its Staff Selection Commission. Every page names the state and links across to the one it is not.

Yes, and you should check. Where a commission runs a one-time registration, our figures come from the registration portal, and an individual advertisement can state something different for that recruitment. Each page says which document it is quoting and when.

Follow the form. As a general rule, photographs and signatures are wanted as images, while certificates and multi-page documents are wanted as PDFs. Submitting a PDF into a photo field fails the check even when the content is correct.

No. Every tool here runs in your browser, including the exam upload tools. Your photograph, signature, thumb impression and certificates are processed on your own device and never transmitted, which matters more for identity documents than for anything else on this site.

Drag your PDFs into the Merge PDF tool, arrange them in the order you want, and click merge. The work happens in a background thread so your browser stays responsive.

Use Merge PDF. There are no watermarks, no page limits and no account required.

CorePDFTools asks for no email and no sign-up. Open the page, select your files, merge, and save.

Yes. You can select many files at once and they are joined into a single document. The practical ceiling is your device's available memory rather than any limit we impose.

Instead of opening Preview, drag both files into CorePDFTools in Safari or Chrome and combine them there — nothing to install.

CorePDFTools runs in Edge, Chrome or Firefox on Windows 11. No third-party software needed.

Because nothing is uploaded, you skip the slow round trip to a server entirely — the only limit is how fast your own device can process the files. Very large documents (hundreds of megabytes) will still take time and are best handled on a desktop rather than a phone.

Rearrange the file list in the Merge tool before you click merge. Pages are assembled in exactly the order shown.

Open Merge PDF, add your documents, arrange them, and download the combined file. No paywall.

The usual causes are password-protected or corrupted source files. Encrypted PDFs must have their protection removed in the application that created them before they can be merged — CorePDFTools does not currently offer a password-removal tool.

Use Split PDF and choose 'split every page'. Each page becomes its own PDF, and all of them are delivered together in a single ZIP file.

Type a page range such as 1-5, 8, 11-14 into the Split tool. Only those pages are copied into a new PDF.

Choose the split-every-page mode. Each page is written to its own PDF and the set is packaged into one ZIP download, assembled entirely in your browser.

Enter the boundaries you want, for example 5-10, in the range field. Only those pages are extracted into a separate document.

Split it by page range into two or more documents, or split every page and keep only the sections you need. Note that splitting reduces page count, not necessarily file size — for that, use the Compress tool.

Type the single page number, for example 4, into the range box and download. You get a one-page PDF.

The split-every-page mode automatically bundles the output into a .zip archive so you get one clean download instead of dozens of separate files.

Yes. Enter the page numbers as a comma-separated list, for example 1,3,5,7,9, in the range field and they will be extracted together into one document.

Encrypted PDFs need their protection removed before they can be split. CorePDFTools does not currently include a password-removal tool, so open the file in a reader that accepts the password and save an unprotected copy first.

Splitting runs locally in a background thread, so there is no upload wait. A 100-page text document is typically a few seconds; image-heavy scans take longer, since every page is written out and compressed into the ZIP.

Most PDF viewers only rotate the on-screen view. The Rotate tool rewrites the page rotation stored inside the file itself, so the change persists in every reader on every device.

Choose 180 degrees in the Rotate tool to flip upside-down scanned pages the right way up.

Apply a 90 degree rotation, clockwise or counter-clockwise, to bring landscape pages back into portrait orientation.

Switch the Rotate tool from 'all pages' to a page range, enter the page number, pick your angle, and save.

Browser and viewer rotation controls usually only change the display, not the file. The Rotate tool rebuilds the document with the new rotation written into the page structure, so it sticks.

Load your file into Rotate PDF, choose 90 degrees clockwise or counter-clockwise, and download the updated document.

Select 180 degrees in the tool. The rotation is applied to the page objects themselves, so it is saved permanently.

Leave the scope set to 'all pages' to rotate every page of a multi-page document in one click.

Load the scan and choose your angle. Rotation only changes the page orientation flag, so the scanned image is not re-compressed and no quality is lost.

Yes. The tool compiles a new PDF file with the rotation baked into the page structure, so it stays rotated wherever you open it.

Open Organize PDF. It renders a thumbnail of every page, and you drag and drop those thumbnails into the order you want before saving.

In the Organize view, use the remove control on any page thumbnail to drop that page from the document.

Organize PDF gives you visual reordering and page deletion at no cost and with no subscription.

Drag the second thumbnail ahead of the first in the grid, then save the reordered document.

Delete the pages you don't want in the Organize grid. Saving produces a fresh PDF containing only the pages you kept.

Yes. Page previews are rendered in your browser so you can drag thumbnails around and see exactly what you are moving.

The Organize tool shows the whole document as a thumbnail grid, so you can inspect the structure and re-sequence it before exporting.

Yes. Remove as many pages as you like in the grid, then save once at the end.

Organize PDF handles full page rearrangement in any modern browser, with no Adobe subscription.

No. The original page objects are copied across into the new document unchanged, so nothing is re-rendered or re-compressed.

Drop your images into the JPG to PDF tool, choose how you want them sized on the page, and download the combined PDF.

The tool accepts both PNG and JPG. Images are embedded directly into PDF pages in your browser.

Use PDF to JPG. Each page is rendered to an image at the quality level you choose, and the whole set is delivered as a ZIP.

Choose the A4 option in JPG to PDF and each image is scaled to fit a standard A4 page with a small margin.

Select all your images at once. They are placed in order as sequential pages of a single PDF.

The PDF to JPG tool currently outputs JPG files, which are a good fit for photos and scans. If you specifically need PNG, convert the exported JPGs afterwards in any image editor.

PDF to JPG automatically packages every rendered page image into a single .zip archive for one tidy download.

Choose the exact-size option in JPG to PDF. Each page is created at the same pixel dimensions as the image, so nothing is cropped or rescaled.

Your original image data is embedded as-is, with no forced downsampling, so full resolution is preserved in the PDF.

PDF to JPG renders each page as a picture, which covers most cases. It exports the page as it appears rather than pulling out the individual embedded image files.

Open Compress PDF and pick Light, Medium or Strong. The tool finds the embedded photographic images in your document, downsamples and re-encodes them, and leaves text and vector graphics completely untouched so they stay sharp and selectable.

Use the target-size tool and select 100 KB. It runs through a series of progressively stronger compression passes and returns the first result that fits under your limit.

Choose the 200 KB target. This is built for strict government, university and job-portal upload limits.

Pick the 500 KB option in the target-size tool and it scales down the embedded image resolution until the file fits.

The target tool works through eight escalating quality and resolution steps, stopping at the first one that lands under your chosen limit of 100, 200, 300 or 500 KB. If no step reaches the target, you get the smallest version it managed.

Choose the Light preset. It keeps image resolution high and only removes redundancy, and text and vectors are never touched at any setting.

Scans are usually large because each page is a full-resolution photograph. Compression works best when those scans are stored as JPEG inside the PDF, which is the most common case. Some scanners save pages in other formats that the tool leaves alone to avoid damaging them — if your file barely shrinks, that is usually why.

Almost always because of high-resolution embedded images or scanned pages. Text is tiny by comparison. A compression pass targets exactly that.

Select 300 KB in the target-size tool and it works down through compression levels until the output fits under that ceiling.

The tool locates the photographic images inside your PDF, redraws them at a lower resolution, re-encodes them at a lower quality setting and writes them back in place. Everything else in the document is left exactly as it was.

Use Sign PDF. Draw your signature on the canvas, place it where you want on the page, and save the signed document.

Draw your signature with a mouse, trackpad or touchscreen, then drag the captured signature onto the page you want it on.

The Sign tool gives you a drawing canvas. Sketch your signature, clear and retry as often as you like, then position it on the page and export.

Open Watermark PDF, type your text (for example CONFIDENTIAL), choose one of the opacity levels, and it is stamped diagonally across every page.

The signing view lets you drag the signature to any position on the page, so you can line it up with a printed signature line.

The Watermark tool places your text at a 45 degree angle across the centre of every page. The angle is fixed, which keeps the result consistent across mixed page sizes.

CorePDFTools runs in the browser on desktop and mobile. There is nothing to install and nothing to upload.

Pick one of three opacity levels — subtle, standard or strong — depending on how visible you want the watermark to be over your content.

Electronic signatures are accepted for many everyday agreements under frameworks such as ESIGN and eIDAS, but the rules vary by country and document type. Note that this tool places a drawn image of your signature on the page; it does not apply a certificate-based digital signature, which is what some legal and financial processes specifically require. Check what your recipient needs, and take legal advice for anything significant.

Type CONFIDENTIAL into the watermark text box and apply. It is stamped across every page instantly, with no server round trip.

Load your scan into the OCR tool. It recognises the text inside the page images and gives you the result as plain text you can copy or download.

Run it through OCR. Optical character recognition reads the shapes in the scanned image and converts them into actual text characters.

Yes. CorePDFTools offers OCR free, with no document limits and no registration.

Use the OCR tool to convert the page images into text, then copy the result or download it as a .txt file.

OCR extracts the text content from your scanned pages so it can be searched and copied. The tool gives you the recognised text; it does not currently write that text layer back into the PDF.

Yes. CorePDFTools uses Tesseract compiled to WebAssembly, so the recognition work happens on your own processor rather than on a remote server.

Load the scan into the OCR tool, wait for recognition to finish, and copy the text straight out of the results panel.

Because the OCR engine runs inside your browser, your scanned document is never uploaded. Only the recognition engine's own language files are downloaded, and they contain nothing about your document.

It means character recognition runs in your own browser using WebAssembly, instead of your file being sent to a remote OCR service and the text sent back.

The first run downloads the recognition engine and language data. Once your browser has cached those, later runs in the same session need no further downloads. Large scans are still slow, since OCR is genuinely heavy work.

Once the page and its libraries are loaded in your tab, the tools keep working without an internet connection for the rest of that session. Note that you do need a connection to load the page in the first place — there is no installable offline app yet.

It is an editor that parses, modifies and rebuilds your document locally in the browser using JavaScript and WebAssembly, rather than sending it to a backend server to be processed.

Heavy file parsing on the main browser thread freezes the interface. Moving that work to a background worker keeps the page responsive and the progress indicator live while your document is processed.

Your documents, never — no file is uploaded, so we could not collect one if we wanted to. The website itself does use Google Analytics and third-party advertising, which set cookies and collect standard technical data like any ad-supported site. See our Privacy Policy for the full detail.

Yes. Merge PDF processes your files entirely in your browser's memory. Nothing is sent to a server.

Client-side processing means your document never crosses the network, which removes an entire category of risk and is why many people use these tools for sensitive files. That said, we make no formal compliance certification for regimes such as HIPAA — if you work under a specific regulatory obligation, check it against your own organisation's requirements.

For everyday tasks — merging, splitting, rotating, compressing, converting, signing — CorePDFTools covers them in the browser with no install and no subscription. For advanced editing of text and layout inside a PDF, a full desktop application is still the right tool.

There is no upload, so there is no server-imposed cap. The real limit is your device's available memory: a modern desktop handles very large files comfortably, while an older phone may struggle.

Because no data is transmitted, legal, medical and financial documents stay entirely on your own computer while you work on them. Closing the tab clears them from memory.

None. Your file never reaches a server, so there is nothing for us to log, store or retain. This is a property of the architecture rather than a policy promise.