PDF Workspace

The PDF Workspace is one place for everything you do to the pages of a PDF. Add PDFs or images, and every page appears as a picture to select, drag, turn or remove. Merge files, split them, put pages in a new order, rotate them, take some out as a new file or delete the ones you do not need, crop their margins, add page numbers, a watermark, text, images or your signature — in as many undoable steps as you like. When the pages are right, it writes one new PDF, opens it again to check that every page is there in the right order, size and rotation, with its number and watermark, and only then offers it to download.

1. Choose PDFs or images, or drop them on the page. Each file's pages are added in their own order.
2. Select pages by clicking them; Ctrl or ⌘-click (or the round tick) adds pages, and Shift-click selects a run. Drag pages to move them, or use the keyboard.
3. Pick a tool on the left — Organise, Merge, Split, Rotate, Extract, Delete, Numbers, Watermark, Crop, Edit, Sign, Convert or Compress — and use its options on the right. Each change is one step in the history, and Ctrl+Z undoes it.
4. Double-click a page, or press Enter, to see it large with zoom.
5. Press Download PDF. The file is made, checked and then offered with its size.

• Changes are kept only while the tab is open. Saving a workspace to continue later is planned, not built.
• Files up to 300 MB each, 1 GB and 5,000 pages in all. A password-protected PDF asks for its password when added.
• Pages are copied as they are, which keeps their quality, but what belongs to the whole document rather than to a page is not carried over: bookmarks, the document outline, file attachments and accessibility tags. Links between pages may stop working. The title of the first file is kept.
• Fillable form fields keep their appearance but may no longer be fillable, and any digital signature in the original is no longer valid in the new file — a signature covers the exact file that was signed.
• Your PDFs are read and written in this browser tab. They are not uploaded to ToolsDev or anyone else, and nothing is saved: closing the tab ends the session, so download what you want to keep (the page asks before you leave with work not downloaded). The page downloads its own code, and pdf.js's fonts and image decoders when a page needs them, from toolsdev.in — none of those requests carries your document.

No. The workspace runs in your browser: pdf.js draws the pages and pdf-lib writes the new file, both on your device. Once the page and the PDF engine have loaded you can even go offline and keep working; only a page that needs a font or image decoder not yet downloaded may fail to draw its picture — the file you download is not affected.

No. Pages are copied into the new file as they are — their text, fonts, images and drawings are not converted or compressed again. Text you could select before stays selectable. Rotation is a setting on the page, not a redraw.

After writing the file, the workspace opens it again and compares it with what you asked for: the number of pages, and each page's size and rotation in order. If anything differs, you get an error instead of a file.

Not yet. This first version works on whole pages. Adding text, images, shapes and signatures is the next stage; changing a PDF's existing text is only possible in limited cases and will be labelled clearly when it comes.

The workspace refuses files that are not PDFs, or are damaged beyond what the reader can recover, and the message says which. A protected PDF asks for its password instead. Very large files over 300 MB are refused before they are read.