Articles & guides
Long-form, practical guides for everyday PDF work — from scanning a school form on your phone to combining a stack of receipts for an expense report. No fluff, written by people who actually use the tools.
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Photos to PDF
Combine pictures from your phone or camera into a single, neatly paginated PDF. The tool below is pre-set to A4 portrait with normal margins — the format most people need for school, work or government forms — but you can change it any time. Files are processed in your browser; nothing is uploaded.
Read the guidePDF tools without upload
Every PDF tool on this site runs inside your browser tab. Your files are read into memory by JavaScript, processed locally, and the result is offered back as a download — none of it is sent to a server. This page explains how that actually works, how to verify it yourself, and which tasks you can do this way today.
Read the guideConvert PDF to high-quality JPG
Export every page of a PDF as a sharp JPG you can print, drop into a design tool or attach to a listing. The tool below is pre-set to High quality (~2.4× scale, 95% JPEG) — drop a PDF and download each page or get a single ZIP. Files are processed in your browser.
Read the guideCombine receipts into one PDF
Photograph each receipt, add them in date order, and export a single A4 PDF you can attach to an expense report or send to your accountant. The tool is pre-set to A4 portrait with a normal margin so receipts print cleanly. Files stay in your browser.
Read the guideScan to PDF from your phone
Skip the scanner app. Photograph each page with your phone's camera, add the photos here, and export a single A4 PDF. Pages are processed in your mobile browser — useful when you don't want to install yet another scanner app that asks for cloud sync.
Read the guideRemove blank pages from a PDF
Get rid of empty pages from a duplex scan, an extra signature page, or printer-inserted blanks. The tool below lets you type the page numbers to remove and download a clean PDF in seconds. Everything runs in your browser.
Read the guideRotate scanned PDF pages
Fix sideways or upside-down scans without re-scanning. Rotate any selection of pages by 90°, 180° or 270° and download a corrected PDF. Useful when a scanner picked the wrong orientation for a few pages of a long document. Everything runs locally.
Read the guideCompress a PDF without uploading
Most online PDF compressors upload your file to a server. This page explains why true high-ratio compression is hard to do in a browser, and walks through three practical workarounds that keep your file local and still cut its size — using only the tools on this site.
Read the guideHow to convert DOCX (Word) to PDF
DOCX is the modern Microsoft Word format introduced in 2007 — a small ZIP package that contains XML descriptions of your text, styles, images and embedded objects. PDF, by contrast, is a frozen visual snapshot. Converting from DOCX to PDF means baking your fonts, line-breaks and images into a file that looks identical on every device. This guide walks through the four reliable ways to do that for free, what each one does to fonts and hyperlinks, and the small details that decide whether the result looks professional or amateur.
Read the guideHow to convert Excel (XLSX) to PDF correctly
Spreadsheets are the format people get wrong most often when exporting to PDF. The default Excel export prints whatever fits on a page and chops the rest, leaving you with a mystery PDF where the right-hand columns are missing. This guide is about the four print settings that decide whether your XLSX becomes a clean, readable PDF — print area, page orientation, scaling, and repeating headers — plus the tools that handle them automatically.
Read the guideHow to convert PowerPoint (PPTX) to PDF
PowerPoint files are time-based — animations, transitions and timing happen on play. PDF is the opposite: a static set of pages. The translation between them isn't automatic, and PowerPoint gives you three different export modes (slides, notes pages, handouts) that suit very different audiences. This guide explains which mode to pick for which situation, how to keep your fonts and links intact, and the file-size traps that turn a 30-slide deck into a 200 MB PDF.
Read the guideHow to convert HEIC photos to PDF
Since iOS 11, iPhones save photos in HEIC — a modern format that produces files about half the size of a JPG at the same quality. The catch is that HEIC isn't supported in browsers or on most non-Apple devices, which is why every web tool that asks for an image rejects your phone photos. This guide explains how to turn HEIC photos into a PDF you can actually share, and the easiest way to stop the problem from happening at all.
Read the guideHow to export a PDF as PNG images
PNG is the lossless image format used by designers, web developers and anyone who needs sharp text or transparency. Where JPG is built for photos and re-compresses every save, PNG keeps every pixel exactly as it was — perfect for diagrams, screenshots, and PDF pages with text. This guide explains when to convert a PDF to PNG instead of JPG, how to get crisp output at the right resolution, and the trade-offs you accept on file size.
Read the guideHow to convert PDF tables to Excel
PDFs were never designed to be edited. When someone sends you a financial report, a price list or a registry export as a PDF and you need it in Excel, the right approach depends entirely on what kind of PDF it is. A digital PDF (created from Word or Excel) still contains the actual numbers as text, so extraction is fast and accurate. A scanned PDF is a picture of a table, so you need OCR — optical character recognition — to read the numbers off the image. This guide covers both, including the editing steps that turn ragged extraction into clean Excel data.
Read the guideHow to convert HTML / web pages to PDF
Saving a web page as PDF sounds trivial — your browser already has a print dialog. The reality is messier: most pages weren't designed for paper, so the default print output includes the navigation bar, the cookie banner and a third of the article cut off in the sidebar. There are four good ways to get a clean PDF from a web page, and the right pick depends on whether you want the article alone, the whole layout, or a developer-grade screenshot.
Read the guideHow to convert Markdown to PDF
Markdown was designed to be plain text that reads naturally and converts to HTML. Increasingly, people use it for everything: meeting notes, READMEs, blog drafts, even invoices. When the time comes to share that content with someone who doesn't read Markdown, you need a PDF. This guide explains the four free toolchains for converting Markdown to PDF, the trade-offs in styling, and the small things — code highlighting, page breaks, headers — that separate a draft-looking PDF from a publishable one.
Read the guideHow to convert EPUB e-books to PDF
EPUB is a reflowable format — text resizes to fit the screen, like a web page. PDF is fixed — every page is a snapshot at a specific size. Converting EPUB to PDF means committing to a single page size and font size, which has consequences for readability and file size. This guide explains when conversion is the right move, the free desktop tools that do it best, and the settings that decide whether the result reads like a real book or like a printed website.
Read the guidePDF workflow for freelancers
Freelancing means handling everything yourself: the contract, the invoice, the portfolio, the proposal, the client report. PDF is the format almost every client expects, and getting comfortable with a small toolkit saves hours per month and keeps your work looking professional. This guide is the practical setup we use ourselves: which tools for invoicing, how to handle contracts (sign, send, archive), how to deliver portfolio work without leaking source files, and the simple privacy rules that keep client documents safe.
Read the guideHow to convert Word to PDF
The full picture: native Word export, browser-based options, formatting pitfalls, and when to use which.
Read the guide