iluvfreetools
Site & safety46 of 46

Risk assessments, method statements, SWMS and job hazard analyses, for the UK, US, Australia and Canada. Finished documents, no empty boxes left for you.

All 46 ›
Structure & materials35 of 35

Steel, timber, concrete, brickwork, boards, groundworks and roofs. Section data, indicative sizing, quantities and the reference tables you normally go hunting for.

All 35 ›
Home & property32 of 32

See what it would look like before you commit, then work out what it takes. Upload a photo of your own wall, drive or house and try things on it.

All 32 ›
Invoices & docs20 of 20

Invoices, quotes, receipts and the rest of the paperwork, generated properly. No account, no watermark, and Download is the only button.

All 20 ›
Money & tax39 of 39

Wages, mortgages, tax and the everyday sums. What you actually take home, what it actually costs, and what you actually owe.

All 39 ›
People & hours46 of 46

Rotas, rosters and schedules, holiday and PTO, timesheets and staff paperwork. The admin that eats a Sunday evening, done in ten minutes.

All 46 ›
Business & marketing50 of 50

Starting up, getting found and keeping the admin straight. Everything downloadable, nothing paywalled at the last step.

All 50 ›
PDF & documents27 of 27

Merge, split, crop, sign, number and compress. Everything runs in your browser, so the contract you open here never reaches a server.

All 27 ›
Image tools24 of 24

Convert, resize, compress, crop and adjust. All of it on your own machine, with no upload, no account and no watermark on anything.

All 24 ›
Text & dates20 of 20

Word counts, case, days between dates, working days and ages. The ten-second look-ups, with no account and nothing stored.

All 20 ›
Random & party27 of 27

Secret Santa, draws, brackets, sweepstakes, printables and party quantities. The bit that is just for fun, done properly.

All 27 ›
Training & tests21 of 21

Practice tests for the cards and licences that decide whether you can work. Every answer cites the guidance it came from, not a forum.

All 21 ›

27 free tools. No sign up.

PDF & documents

Merge, split, crop, sign, number and compress. Everything runs in your browser, so the contract you open here never reaches a server.

Show tools for

A tool that works anywhere counts under every country, which is why these add to more than 27. A badge on a tile means it is built for specific markets.

PDF tools

25

Merge, split, crop, rotate, watermark, number and compress.

Organise a PDFMerge, split, reorder, rotate and delete pages on one screen.Merge PDFJoin PDFs into one, in any order, without uploading them anywhere.Split PDFPull pages out, or cut one document into several.Rotate PDFTurn pages the right way up and save them that way.Delete PDF pagesTake pages out and keep everything else.Extract PDF pagesPull the pages you want into a new document.Crop PDFTrim the margins or the scanner border off every page.Watermark a PDFStamp DRAFT or your own name across every page.Add page numbersNumber a PDF, skipping the cover if it has one.Flatten a PDFMake a filled form permanent so nobody can change it.Compress PDFShrink a PDF enough to email, by re-encoding the images that make it big.PDF to JPGEvery page as an image, at whatever resolution you need.PDF to WordExtract the text and layout into an editable document.Images to PDFPhone photos of documents into one tidy PDF.Sign & fillFill the fields, draw the signature, flatten it.Redact a PDFActually deletes the text, then proves it is gone.Strip metadataRemove the author, software and history before you send it.Password protect a PDFPut a real AES-256 password on it, on your own machine.Unlock a PDFTake off a password you know, or restrictions that need none.Make a scan searchableReads the text off a scanned PDF so you can search and copy it.PDF to ExcelEvery table out as a spreadsheet, with the figures as real numbers.Compare two PDFsEvery wording change between two versions, side by side.Get the images out of a PDFPull every photo, logo and stamp out as its own file.Repair a damaged PDFRebuilds a file that will not open, when there is enough left to rebuild.PDF to textGet the words out, and find out why you could not.

Packs & bundles

2

O&M handover packs, Bates numbering and hyperlinked indexes.

O&M pack builderUKHandover pack with sections, bookmarks and a hyperlinked index.Bates numberingContinuous numbering across a merged set, with the map exported.

Guides and explainers

1

Written answers rather than tools, for the questions the calculators above do not settle. No sign up on these either.

Read 1

Nothing is uploaded, and that is not a marketing line

Every tool in this section runs in your browser. The file you open is processed on your own device, it is never sent anywhere, and there is no server holding a copy. Close the tab and there is no trace.

That is worth more than it sounds. The usual free PDF tools upload your document to somebody else infrastructure, and people put contracts, invoices, medical letters and passport scans through them without thinking about it. Here there is nothing to think about, because there is nowhere for it to go.

PDFs

Merge, split, reorder, rotate and delete pages from one screen rather than five separate tools. Images and phone photos into a single tidy document. Fill in a form, draw a signature and flatten it.

Pages, and the four different things people mean by that

Pulling pages out, deleting pages, cutting one document into parts and putting a bundle back in order are four separate jobs that happen to share one engine underneath. Each has its own page here, because each is a different thing to need.

The order you type is the order you get, which turns extracting into reordering. Repeats work too, so asking for page one three times gives you three copies of it, which sounds odd until you need a signature sheet in a pack.

Compressing, which is two completely different jobs

A scan is a photograph of paper, often 300 dots per inch and twenty megabytes for ten pages. Redrawing those photographs smaller is enormously effective and loses nothing that was ever there. A document out of Word is already tiny and efficient, and doing the same thing to it makes the file BIGGER while permanently destroying the text layer, so it can never be searched or copied again.

Almost every free compressor rasterises both and mentions neither. This one looks at the document first, tells you which of the two you have, and marks the option that suits it. If you choose the destructive one on a document with real text in it, it puts the character count in front of you before it will do it.

What runs in a browser, and what honestly does not

Some file jobs genuinely cannot be done well on your own machine, and rather than shipping a bad version this site does not ship them at all. That list is shorter than it was, and it is worth saying which came off it, because the reason they came off is the whole argument for building this way.

Two that used to be on this list and are not any more:

  • Putting a password on a PDF. This needed encryption WRITTEN into the file, and the usual browser libraries can read encryption without being able to produce it. A different engine solved it, so the tool now applies real AES-256 on your own machine, and the file never goes anywhere to have it done.
  • PDF to Word. Pulling the text out was always easy. Rebuilding a faithful editable document out of absolutely positioned glyphs is the hard part, and it is why this sat unbuilt for a long time. It ships now with the honest caveat attached: it preserves the text and a workable layout, and it will not reproduce a complicated one exactly.

What is still genuinely off the list:

  • Video compression. It caps out around a couple of hundred megabytes when the archetypal file is an eight hundred megabyte phone video, so it would fail on precisely the case you wanted it for.
  • Anything that summarises or answers questions about a document. That means sending the file to a server and paying for every request, which cannot be given away without limits, accounts or a catch. It is the funnel the big PDF sites are built on and it is the one thing here that will not be copied.

Every one of those exists elsewhere as a free tool that uploads your file to somebody else’s server to do the work. That is the trade, and it is a reasonable one to make knowingly. It is not one this site will make on your behalf without telling you.

Commonly asked questions & answers

Why did compressing my PDF make it bigger?

Because there was nothing left to squeeze and the attempt added its own overhead. A PDF that is mostly text and vector drawing is already compact: the letters are instructions, not pixels, and re-encoding them cannot beat what is already there. The same happens to a PDF whose images were compressed once already, since a second pass re-encodes an approximation of an approximation and often costs bytes as well as quality. Compression only wins where the file holds big, lightly compressed raster images, which in practice means scans and photographs.

What is PDF/A and do I need it?

It is a restricted version of PDF designed to still open correctly in decades, and you need it when somebody tells you to, which is usually a court, an archive or a regulator. The restrictions are the point: fonts must be embedded rather than assumed present, everything the page needs must be inside the file rather than linked, and encryption is not allowed because a file nobody can decrypt in 2050 is not archived. For ordinary sending it buys you nothing and makes the file larger.

Source: PDF/A, Library of Congress format registry

Can somebody undo a redaction I drew over the text?

If you drew a black rectangle, yes, and trivially. A PDF page is a list of instructions, and drawing a filled shape adds an instruction to paint black. It does not remove the instruction that paints the text, which is still sitting underneath and still selectable, copyable and searchable. This has embarrassed governments and law firms repeatedly and it will keep doing so. A real redaction removes the underlying content and then covers the gap, which is a different operation with the same appearance, and the appearance is exactly why people get it wrong.

Why can I not search the text in my scanned PDF?

Because there is no text in it. A scan is a photograph of a page wrapped in a PDF container, so what looks like writing is an arrangement of pixels with nothing behind it. Making it searchable needs OCR, which reads the shapes and writes a text layer underneath the image, and the result is a best guess rather than a transcript. That matters more than people expect: OCR does not fail loudly. It quietly turns a 5 into an S and leaves the page looking perfect.

Does splitting or merging a PDF lose quality?

No, and this is the one operation on this hub that genuinely costs nothing. Splitting copies whole page objects from one file into another, byte for byte, so page 7 of the split is identical to page 7 of the original: the same image data, the same fonts, the same vectors. Merging does the reverse. What can change is file size, because a merge may carry two copies of a font that both files embedded, and because a split still carries the whole font even if the page uses six letters of it.

Where did my form fields go after flattening?

Into the page, permanently, which is what flattening means. An interactive PDF form is two things at once: the page, and a layer of form field objects sitting on top holding the values. Flattening paints those values into the page itself and deletes the fields, so what was a filled-in form becomes a picture of a filled-in form. That is usually what you want when sending it, because nothing can be edited and nothing depends on the reader supporting forms. It is not reversible, so flatten a copy.

Do PDF passwords actually work?

One kind does and the other is theatre. A user password is real encryption: without it the content cannot be decrypted and no tool can open the file. An owner password sets permissions, no printing, no copying, no editing, on a file that is otherwise not encrypted at all, and it works only because readers politely honour the flag. Any tool that ignores the flag reads the file straight through. So if the content genuinely must not be seen, it needs a user password, and the strength of that is the strength of the password.

Source: ISO 32000, the PDF standard

Why does my PDF print at the wrong size?

Almost always the printer dialog rather than the file. Every PDF page carries its own size, and printers cannot print to the very edge of a sheet, so print dialogs default to shrinking the page a few per cent to fit inside the unprintable margin. That is fit to page, and it silently rescales everything. Set the printer to 100 per cent or actual size instead. If something then falls off the edge, the page really is bigger than the paper, and that is a different problem worth knowing about.

Does stripping metadata remove everything?

It removes the metadata, which is less than people assume. A PDF can carry your name in the document information, again in an XMP packet, and again inside individual embedded images that kept their own camera data when they went in. Clearing the first and not the others is the usual half-job. And none of it touches what is actually in the document: a name in the text, a signature in a scan, or an earlier version left in the file by an editor that saved incrementally.

Why is there no file size limit here?

Because there is no server to run out of. Every tool on this hub opens your file in the browser you are already using, which means the limit is your own machine rather than somebody hosting bill. That is the whole economic difference: an upload service pays for bandwidth, storage and processing per file, so it caps you, queues you, or asks for an email address to make the cost back. None of those costs exist here, which is why there is no cap, no queue and no watermark, and why the file never existed anywhere but on your laptop.