๐ File Tools
Merge, split and compress PDFs, encode Base64
Combine multiple PDFs into one. Free online PDF merger and combiner.
Open tool โExtract pages from a PDF. Free PDF splitter and page extractor.
Open tool โEncode or decode Base64 strings. Free Base64 encoder and decoder tool.
Open tool โPDF and encoding tools that run entirely on your machine. Merge a set of documents, pull pages out of one, or convert to and from base64.
This is the category where in-browser processing matters most. A PDF you are merging is often a contract, an invoice, a medical form or a signed document โ the sort of thing that should not be uploaded to an unknown server in exchange for a free tool. Nothing here leaves your device.
Which tool do I want?
| If youโฆ | Use |
|---|---|
| You have several PDFs that should be one document | Merge PDF |
| You need particular pages out of a larger PDF | Split PDF |
| You need a file or string as base64 | Base64 Encode |
What PDF compression actually removes
Most of the weight in a large PDF is images. Compression works by re-encoding them at a lower resolution or a higher JPEG loss, and everything else โ text, vectors, fonts โ is already about as small as it gets. So a text-heavy report barely shrinks, while a scanned document can drop by 80%.
That tells you when to stop. If a mostly-text PDF is still too large, compression is not the answer; something else is inflating it, usually embedded font subsets or an attachment.
Compression is also one-way. Detail thrown out of an image is gone, and running the file through twice compounds the damage. Keep the original โ particularly for anything scanned that may need to be read later, where over-compression turns small print into mush.