Frequently asked questions

No. Every tool on PDFDad runs inside your browser using JavaScript. Your PDF is read from your disk into your browser's memory, processed there, and written back out as a download. It never travels across the network, so there is nothing for us to store, leak or hand over.

Yes. All 30 tools are free with no account, no trial, no page limits and no watermarks added to your output. The site is paid for by the ads you see around the tools.

No. PDFDad runs in any modern browser on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android or iOS. There is nothing to download and no extension to add.

The practical limit is your device's memory rather than a rule we impose. We warn above 50 MB and block above 100 MB, because larger files can exhaust the browser tab. If you hit that ceiling, split the PDF first and process the parts.

Mostly yes. After your first visit the site is cached, and each tool caches the library it needs the first time you use it. Once that has happened the tool keeps working with no connection at all.

Compression works by re-encoding embedded images. A PDF that is mostly vector text is already about as small as it gets, so there is little to squeeze. Scanned documents, which are really pictures of pages, shrink dramatically.

A PDF stores positioned glyphs, not a document structure, so any conversion back to an editable format is a reconstruction. Straightforward, text-first documents convert well. Multi-column magazine layouts, complex tables and heavy styling will need tidying up afterwards. We would rather say so than promise perfection.

No. Unlock PDF removes protection only when you type the correct password. We do not crack, guess or bypass encryption, and we would not publish a tool that did.

Yes. Redact PDF rasterises each redacted page with the marked areas painted out and rebuilds the document from those images, so the original text is destroyed rather than hidden under a black rectangle. The trade-off is that redacted pages are no longer searchable.

The current and previous versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari, on desktop and mobile. Older browsers may be missing the APIs the tools rely on.

We store your theme choice and your cookie decision in your browser's local storage. Analytics and advertising cookies are only set if you accept them in the consent banner. Our Cookie Policy lists everything.

Use the contact form, or email us directly. We read everything and we prioritise bug reports over feature requests.

No. There is no sign-up, no email verification and no login. We deliberately built the site so that there is nothing to have an account for — no files are stored, so there is nothing to come back to.

Yes. Use them at work, for clients, for anything lawful. There is no licence fee and no restriction on commercial use. The Terms and Conditions set out the limits, and they are about lawful use rather than about who you are.

Because the PDF engine is a few hundred kilobytes and there is no point sending it to someone who only came to read the FAQ. Each tool fetches what it needs the first time you use it, after which your browser caches it and the tool works offline.

All of it. The layout adapts down to small screens, and the signature pad in particular is better with a finger than with a mouse. Very large documents are limited by the memory a mobile browser will give a tab, so a 200-page scan may be happier on a desktop.

The job stops and everything it was holding is discarded. There is no partial upload left anywhere and no half-finished file on a server, because there is no server involved.

No. There is no daily cap, no queue and no throttle, because you are using your own device's processing rather than ours. The only limits are the per-file size ceiling of 100 MB and how much memory your browser will give the tab.

The site is static HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no backend, so it can be hosted anywhere that serves files. If you want to run a private copy for an organisation, get in touch and we will talk about it.

Anything that predates widespread support for ES modules and WebAssembly — Internet Explorer, and mobile browsers more than a few years out of date. Current Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari all work, as do their previous versions.