About

Built out of annoyance

This site started with a report that had to fit into an email attachment. The first free compressor shrank it by quietly turning every page into a picture: the text stopped being selectable, the print came out soft, and nobody mentioned any of it.

The second one queued the file, stamped a watermark across the first page, and allowed two files an hour unless a subscription appeared.

The pattern behind both was the same. The file travelled to somebody's server, the work happened far away, and whatever came back was presented as done. Damage, queues and limits were discovered after the fact, never before.

So the tools here were built the other way round. They run where the file already is, inside your browser tab, and they prove their own output before offering a download. How it works describes the mechanism step by step.

Two rules everything follows

Every tool on this site obeys the same two rules, with no exceptions.

First, your file never leaves your device. There is no upload step, no processing queue and no server copy to delete afterwards.

Turn off your network after the page loads and the tool still runs. That is the simplest proof available.

Second, no unchecked result ships. Each tool reopens what it produced with an independent reader, counts pages and selectable characters, and compares them with your original.

A result that does not match is thrown away instead of handed to you. A refused download is therefore a feature working, not a failure hiding.

What you will not find here

There are no accounts, no watermarks, no daily file limits and no queues.

There is also an honest edge to what a browser tab can do. Reading text out of a photographed scan, running one operation over hundreds of files at once, or holding a thousand-page archive with full-page images in memory are not browser jobs, and they are not pretended to be.

When a tool cannot do something, its page says so in plain words instead of failing quietly.

If a tool refuses your file and prints a message, the support page carries every message word for word, with what it means and what to try next.

Standing on open source

The reading half of every operation is pdf.js, the reader Mozilla ships with Firefox. The writing half is pdf-lib, a widely used library for building PDF files.

Image decoding, font subsetting and JPEG encoding come from similarly public projects. All of them arrive with the page as plain code anyone can inspect, and the licenses page names each library, what it does here, and where to read its license or exact source.

Nothing upstream is modified. The libraries are used as published, so a fix or an audit made by their communities reaches this site with the next update instead of living in a private fork.

Who answers the mail

pdfmonks is a small independent project, and it is judged by how its tools behave rather than by who stands behind them. There is no company story on this page on purpose.

The architecture is the promise. It can be checked from your own browser.

If something breaks, write to [email protected]. Say which tool page you were on, paste the exact message on screen, and name your browser and operating system.

Never attach the document itself; the tools never upload your file and we do not want a copy of it. The privacy page lists the whole boundary of what leaves your browser and what never does.