Four jobs cover almost every PDF task
Nearly every PDF problem falls into one of four groups: the file is too big, several files should be one, one file should be several, or the PDF is in the wrong format for what you need next. The tools on this page handle those four jobs. They are free, and none of them needs an account.
That last group is where most of the confusion sits. A PDF preserves exactly how a document looks, but it is poor at letting you change it. So people convert: into Word to edit, into images to share a single page, or into plain text to work with the contents.
Which PDF tool should you use?
Start with what is wrong with the file in front of you. If an email or an upload form refuses it for size, use Compress PDF Online to reduce file size. If a contract, its annexes and a signed last page sit in three separate files, use Merge PDF Files into one document and send one tidy file instead of three attachments. Going the other way, Split PDF Files to extract the pages you need is the tool when a long document contains just two pages that someone actually asked for.
For editing, use PDF to Word to make a document editable again. Expect to tidy up the formatting afterwards — complicated layouts with tables and columns rarely come across perfectly. When you need a page as a picture, choose between PDF to JPG for a smaller image file and PDF to PNG for a sharper page image: JPG gives you the lighter file, PNG keeps text edges crisper.
The reverse trip is just as common. Turn scanned pages or photos into a single document with JPG to PDF to combine images into one file, or use PNG to PDF for screenshots and diagrams when the images need to arrive in order.
The scanned PDF trap, and how to avoid it
Here is the one that wastes the most time. If a PDF was made by scanning paper, it is really a photograph of a page. There is no text inside it to copy. The PDF Text Extractor to pull text out of a document will correctly find nothing, because there is nothing stored as text.
A scan needs the OCR route instead: extract the page as an image first, then read that image with an OCR tool to get editable words. Knowing which kind of PDF you have — born-digital or scanned — decides the tool before you start.
A simple order for document work
Do the structural jobs before the cosmetic ones. Merge or split first, so you are working on the final set of pages. Convert second, if you need to edit or reuse anything. Compress last, once, on the finished document — compressing a file you are about to merge into another one just means compressing the combined file again later.