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. 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.

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.
• PDF to JPG: Get every page of a PDF as an 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: Add text, cover something, drop a signature on it.
• PDF OCR: Take the words out of a PDF as a plain text file.