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About OnePDF

A drawer full of PDF tools that never leaves your desk

OnePDF started from a simple annoyance: most free "PDF tool" sites make you upload a document to a stranger's server just to rotate a page. We wanted the opposite - tools that do the job right there in the browser tab you already have open.

What OnePDF does

OnePDF bundles seven everyday PDF tasks into one page: merging files together, splitting a file apart, compressing it down, rotating pages the right way up, pulling images out of a document, turning photos into a single PDF, and converting text-based PDFs into editable Word documents.

How it works, technically

Everything runs client-side, using open-source JavaScript libraries loaded into this page:

  • pdf-lib — builds and edits PDF files: merging pages, setting rotation, embedding images, and writing the final bytes.
  • PDF.js — Mozilla's PDF renderer, used to draw page thumbnails and read embedded images without a plugin.
  • JSZip — bundles multiple output files (like split pages or extracted images) into a single ZIP download.

Because all three libraries run in JavaScript inside your browser, your file is read into your device's memory, processed there, and then handed back to you as a download. At no point does OnePDF send the contents of your document to a server we control.

Why it matters

Documents people run through PDF tools are often personal — tax forms, contracts, ID scans, medical paperwork. Not having to trust a third-party server with that content is a meaningful privacy improvement, and it also means the tools work instantly, without waiting on an upload or a processing queue.

Honest limitations

Browser-based processing has real trade-offs, and we'd rather be upfront about them than oversell the tool:

  • Very large files (typically several hundred megabytes) can be slow or memory-heavy, depending on your device and browser.
  • Our "Maximum" compression mode re-encodes each page as an image, which shrinks file size a lot but means the text is no longer selectable in the output — that trade-off is explained on the compress tool itself.
  • Image extraction relies on PDF.js's ability to read a file's internal image objects; a small number of unusually structured PDFs may not expose images this way, in which case we fall back to full-page snapshots.

Who's behind it

OnePDF is an independent, small-scale project. If you run into a bug or have an idea for another tool, the contact page reaches a real inbox.