Guides

Straight answers to the questions people actually type, each one with the limits stated. If a guide says a tool here is the wrong choice for your job, that is not modesty. It is the useful part.

• How to scan a document without installing an app

  Open a scanning tool in your phone's browser, photograph the page, and let it find the edges and straighten it. No install, no account, and on a tool that works client-side the photograph never leaves the phone. The whole job takes about thirty seconds.

• How to scan a CNIC with both sides on one page

  Photograph the front, photograph the back, and place them on one A4 sheet at 85.6 × 54 mm, the real card size. Printed at 100%, the copy measures the same as the card, which is what an office checking it expects.

• How to compress a PDF small enough to send

  Rewrite the file's structure first, which keeps the text selectable and is sometimes enough. If it is not, rasterising each page makes the file much smaller and turns the text into a picture. Which one is right depends entirely on whether anyone needs to search or copy from the document afterwards.

• Scan to PDF on Android without installing anything

  Open the tool in Chrome, tap to take a photo of the page, and export a PDF. Android's camera integration means the file picker offers the camera directly, so it feels much like a scanner app, without the install, the account or the permissions.

• How to make a scanned PDF searchable

  Text recognition reads the words off each page image, and they are written back into the PDF invisibly, in the place they were read from. The file still looks exactly like a scan, but find-in-page, copy and paste, and screen readers all work on it.

• ID card photocopy size: what offices actually expect

  85.6 × 54 mm, which is 8.56 × 5.4 cm or 3.37 × 2.13 inches. That is ID-1, the international standard, and a CNIC, a driving licence, a passport card and a bank card are all this size. A copy printed at 100% should measure the same as the card itself.

• How to combine photos into one PDF

  Add the images, drag them into the order you want, choose a page size, and export once. The result is one PDF with one image per page, which is what an email attachment or an upload form nearly always wants instead of six separate files.

• How to turn a PDF page into an image

  Open the PDF, choose a resolution, and save the page you want as a JPG or a PNG. 150 DPI is right for anything that will be looked at on a screen and 300 DPI for anything that will be printed. Higher than 300 mostly buys file size.

• How to scan both sides of an ID card onto one page

  Two routes. Most office printers have an ID card copy mode that scans both sides and lays them on one sheet for you. If yours does not, or you only have a phone, photograph each side and let a layout tool place them, then print at 100%.

• How to compress a PDF to 100KB

  Try the compressor's Keep text mode first: for a typed document it is often enough. If the file is a scan or full of photographs, switch to Rasterise at the Small setting, which shrinks image-heavy pages the most. A single scanned page can often get under 100KB that way; several scanned pages usually cannot, and then the honest fix is to split the file or scan it again in greyscale.

• How to fill in a PDF form without printing it

  Open the form in a PDF form filler, type into each field and save. If the form has real fields, your answers go into them and stay editable. If it is a flat scan with no fields, use a PDF editor to place text on the lines instead. Save a new copy, and flatten it if the recipient must not be able to change the answers.

• How to sign a PDF without printing it

  Photograph your signature on white paper, open the PDF in a signing tool, add the signature image, place it on the line and save. That electronic signature is accepted for most everyday forms and contracts. It is not a certificate-based digital signature, which some formal documents ask for.

• How to merge a PDF and JPG images into one PDF

  Turn the JPGs into a PDF first with an image to PDF tool, then merge that PDF with your other PDFs in the order you want. It takes two steps, and the pages from the original PDFs are copied rather than redrawn, so their text stays sharp and selectable.

• How to crop a PDF

  Open the PDF in a crop tool, choose how much to trim and from which edges, and save. Every page is trimmed by the same amount and nothing is redrawn, so text stays sharp. Cropping only hides the edges: the trimmed strip is still in the file and anyone can restore it.

• How to add page numbers to a PDF

  Open the PDF in a page numbering tool, choose the position and the style, say whether the first page is a cover, and save. If the document is made of several files, merge them first and number the whole bundle once, so the numbers run in one sequence.

The tools themselves

• PDF Scanner: Turn a photo of a document into a straight, clean PDF.
• JPG to PDF: Put images into a PDF, in the order you choose.
• PNG to PDF: Turn PNG images and screenshots into one PDF.
• PDF to JPG: Get every page of a PDF as an image.
• PDF to PNG: Every page of a PDF as a sharp PNG image.
• Compress PDF: Make a PDF smaller, and see exactly what it cost.
• ID Card Scan: Front and back of a card, on a single A4 sheet.
• Merge PDF: Join several PDFs into one, in the order you choose.
• Split PDF: Take a range of pages out, or break a file into its pages.
• Rotate PDF: Turn the pages the right way up, without redrawing them.
• Organise PDF: See every page, drop the ones you do not want, move the rest.
• Protect PDF: Put a password on a PDF, with AES 256, in your browser.
• Unlock PDF: Take the password off a PDF you can already open.
• Edit PDF: Change the words on the page, add text, cover, sign.
• Sign PDF: Put your signature on a PDF without printing it.
• PDF to Text: Take the words out of a PDF as a plain text file.
• Image to Text: Real recognition. Reads a photograph, not just a text layer.
• PDF Metadata: What a PDF says about itself, and how to take it off.
• Watermark PDF: Print words across every page. A label, not a lock.
• Crop PDF: Trim the margins off every page.
• Add page numbers: A number on every page, where readers look for one.
• Flatten PDF: Make the answers part of the page, so everyone sees the same thing.
• PDF to Word: An editable document out of a PDF, with the limits stated.
• PDF to Excel: Get a PDF's tables into a spreadsheet, where they are tables.
• PDF to PowerPoint: A deck you can edit, back out of the PDF somebody sent you.
• Word to PDF: The easy direction, and it comes out looking right.
• Excel to PDF: A spreadsheet as a PDF, with the page breaks it was given.
• PowerPoint to PDF: One page per slide, ready to send or print.
• Redact PDF: Removes the words. Does not draw a box over them.
• Sanitise PDF: Strips the scripts, the hidden files and the actions that fire on open.
• PDF to JSON: Every page as data: its text, its tables, its size.
• Fill a PDF form: Type into the fields the form already has, in this tab.
• Ask a PDF: Answers from your document, with the page it came from.