About PDFteka

We make free PDF tools that do their work on your own device instead of on a server. This page explains how that is possible, what it gets you, and where the honest limits of the approach are.

What PDFteka is

PDFteka is a collection of free tools for everyday work with PDF files: merge, split, rotate, delete and reorder pages, edit, sign, stamp, watermark, add page numbers, crop, compress, convert to and from images, Word and Excel, and recognize text in scans.

There is no account, no subscription, no daily quota and no watermark on your output. There is also no upload: every tool runs inside your browser, on the machine in front of you.

Why the tools run in your browser

For most of the web's history a PDF service had only one way to work: you uploaded a file, a server somewhere did the job, and you downloaded the result. Browsers simply could not handle binary formats on their own.

That changed. A modern browser can read a file from your disk, parse a PDF, render its pages to a canvas, rebuild the document and hand the result back to your downloads folder. We use well-tested open-source engines to do it: pdf.js from Mozilla for rendering, pdf-lib for writing PDFs, tesseract.js for text recognition.

So we built the whole thing to run on the client side. Our server has exactly one job — sending you an HTML page and some JavaScript. It never sees a document, which means we never see one either.

What that changes for you

Privacy comes first. A contract under NDA, a payslip, a passport scan or a medical report never leaves the machine you are sitting at. There is no retention policy to read, no copy on hardware you do not control, and no awkward question to answer in a data protection review.

Speed comes second. There is no upload wait and no download wait, so a 200-page report is limited by your processor rather than by your connection, and there are no queues at busy hours.

And there are no quotas. Nothing is rationing access, so we set no daily limit and no file size cap. Once a page has loaded, most tools even keep working with the connection switched off.

The trade-offs, stated honestly

Local processing has costs, and we would rather write them down than let you discover them. Large files depend on your device's memory: a 500-page scan that a laptop handles comfortably can be slow, or fail outright, on an older phone. Working in smaller batches usually solves it.

Text recognition is the one tool that needs the network to start, because the recognition engine and its language data are downloaded from a public CDN on first run. Your file is not part of that download, but for that reason we do not describe the OCR page as working offline.

Conversions are approximations. PDF to Word and PDF to Excel rebuild your content in a different format, so complex layouts need tidying afterwards. OCR misreads poor scans and cannot read handwriting. Compression re-draws pages as images, which shrinks the file but flattens selectable text, links and form fields.

Who makes it

PDFteka is a small independent project rather than a large company. It is built and maintained by a small independent team who needed these tools themselves and got tired of upload limits, sign-up walls and messages announcing that today's two free tasks have been used up.

We are not going to invent numbers about millions of users, or awards nobody gave us. What we can tell you is precisely what the site does and does not do — and that is written out in plain language on our privacy page, including the parts that are less flattering.

How it is paid for

Running PDFteka is inexpensive precisely because there is no processing to pay for: the server sends static files and your device does the work. That is why every tool can be free, with no trial period and no feature held back.

There is no advertising and no analytics on the site today. We may add unobtrusive advertising, or privacy-friendly analytics that set no cookies, to cover costs later. If we do, we will update the privacy page first, and visitors in the EEA and the UK will be asked for consent before any personalised ads or advertising cookies.

We will not quietly start charging for something that is free today. And we will never fund the site by doing anything with your documents, for the simple reason that we do not have them.

Built on open source

We are grateful to the projects that make this possible: pdf.js, pdf-lib, tesseract.js and the DejaVu fonts, along with the browser standards that finally let a web page handle files properly. Each remains under its own license, and none of them endorses us.

Tell us what is missing

The tool list grows from what people ask for. If something you need is not here, or one of your files produced a bad result, write to info@pdfteka.com. The contact page explains what to include in a report — and why you should not attach the document itself. If the tool exists but the task is the awkward part, the step-by-step guides work through the cases people ask about most.