Tools · 4 min read
Working with PDFs: Merge, Split, Compress, and Rotate
PDF is the format for documents that must look the same everywhere. It is also famously awkward to edit — but the everyday jobs of merging, splitting, rotating, and shrinking are simple once you know what a PDF holds.
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What is inside a PDF
A PDF is a collection of pages, each describing exactly where text, vector shapes, and images go, plus fonts, metadata, and sometimes forms and bookmarks. Because pages are independent objects, tools can reorder, copy, rotate, or remove them without touching their content.
Merging and splitting
Merging copies pages from several files into one; splitting does the reverse. Both are lossless — page content is not re-rendered. Bookmarks and form fields may not carry across in every tool, so check the result if those matter.
Why compression varies
A PDF's size is usually dominated by images. Scanned documents and photo-heavy files shrink a lot when images are downsampled and recompressed. Text-only PDFs are already small, and compressing them further gains little. Heavy compression makes scans blurry, so pick the strongest setting that keeps text readable.
Privacy
Contracts, IDs, and bank statements are often the documents people need to merge or compress. Tools that process files in your browser never upload them. Also note that covering text with a black box does not remove it — use proper redaction for sensitive information.