How to merge PDF files

Combining PDFs usually means handing a contract or a set of invoices to a website you have never heard of. This does it on your own machine.

Merge several PDFs into one

1. Open the converter and go to the "Convert a file" tab.
2. Add all the PDFs at once. Order matters — they are merged in the order shown in the list.
3. A "Merge these PDFs into one file" bar appears above the buttons. Click Combine.
4. merged.pdf downloads.

Open the tool

If the order is wrong, remove a file with the × on its card and add it again — it goes to the end of the list.

Split a PDF into separate files

Add a single PDF, choose Split into one PDF per page, and convert. You get a zip containing one PDF per page, numbered in order. Useful when a scanner has produced one long document out of what should have been separate records.

Extract a page range

Add a PDF, open Image and page settings, and type the pages you want into "Pages to extract". Then choose Extract a page range and convert.

The field accepts:

• 5 — a single page
• 1-3 — a range
• 1-3,7,10-12 — any mixture
• 8- — page 8 to the end

Pages outside the document are ignored rather than causing an error, and the output is always in document order regardless of how you typed the range.

Rotate pages

Choose a rotation under "Image and page settings", then pick Rotate pages as the output. The rotation applies to every page and adds to any rotation already stored in the file, which is the behaviour you want for a document scanned sideways.

What this cannot do

• Encrypted or password-protected PDFs cannot be opened. Remove the protection in the software that applied it first.
• Compressing a PDF is not offered. Genuine PDF compression means re-encoding embedded images and subsetting fonts, and doing it badly produces a file that looks noticeably worse.
• Editing text inside a PDF is a different class of tool entirely.

A note on large documents

Everything happens in your browser's memory, so merging a dozen small PDFs is instant while combining several hundred-megabyte scans may be slow or may exhaust the tab. If it struggles, merge in two stages.