PDF guides
The tools handle the doing. These are for the deciding — the questions that come before or after a tool, where knowing what is actually going on changes what you do next.
- Preparing a scanned document to sendA scan hides text you cannot see and metadata you did not add. What to check, and in what order, before a scanned document leaves your hands.
- A black box is not redactionA black rectangle drawn over a name leaves the name in the file. Learn how PDF redaction really works, how leaks happen, and how to check your own document.
- Why is my PDF so large?Find out what is really taking up space in a PDF — scanned images, embedded fonts, duplicated resources — and which of them compression can and cannot recover.
- What text recognition can and cannot readRecognition reads a crisp printed page well and a faint or skewed one badly. What affects accuracy, and how to tell whether a result can be trusted.
- What makes a PDF searchableA scan is a picture of words, not words. What a text layer is, how recognition adds one, and how to check whether a PDF you have already has one.
- When a PDF will not openA PDF that will not open is usually truncated, password-protected or genuinely damaged. How to tell which of the three you have, and what fixes each.
- Sending several documents at onceMerging, zipping and splitting solve different problems. Which one to reach for when you have several files to send and a size limit you have to meet.
- Choosing an image format for a PDFJPG, PNG and WebP behave very differently inside a PDF. Which to use for photographs, which for screenshots, and which for pages of scanned text.
- Why a scan will not compress below 100 KBYour compressor hit its floor and the scan is still too big. What decides the size of a scanned PDF, and the fix that works when compression cannot.
- Your PDF is too large to emailGmail, Outlook and corporate servers each cut off at a different size, and encoding inflates your file in transit. The real limits, and four ways past them.
- An alternative to iLovePDF and SmallpdfiLovePDF, Smallpdf and Adobe all process your document on their servers. Here is what that means in practice, where it is genuinely better, and where it is not.
- Are online PDF tools safe?Most PDF sites upload your document to a server. Four checks that tell you what a tool really does with your file, without taking anyone's word for it.
- PDF work for legal teamsCourt bundles, disclosure and privilege review put demands on PDFs that ordinary tools handle badly. What breaks, and the order of operations that avoids it.
- PDF work for teachersAssembling worksheets, splitting a scanned pile of submissions, and keeping printing costs down. The PDF jobs that come up in a classroom, done quickly.
- PDF work for accountants and bookkeepersGetting figures out of statements, bundling invoices for filing, and meeting the size limits that tax portals impose. The PDF jobs behind a finance workflow.
- PDF work for HR teamsHiring and personnel paperwork is dense with personal data. How to bundle, redact and share it without creating a data-protection problem for yourself.
- PDF work on a phone, without an appMerging, compressing and scanning on a phone usually means an app that wants a subscription. What a browser can do instead, and where the real limits are.
- Why a PDF prints wrongA PDF that looks right on screen and prints wrong usually has one of five specific causes. How to identify which, and what actually fixes each one.
- Why Excel changes your CSVPostcodes lose their leading zero, reference numbers turn into scientific notation, and 3-4 becomes a date. What Excel does on the way in, and how to avoid it.