Which tool for which job
| You want to | Use |
|---|---|
| Combine several PDFs into one | Merge PDF |
| Take some pages out as a new file, or one file per page | Split PDF |
| Remove pages you do not need | Delete PDF pages |
| Fix pages that are sideways or upside down | Rotate PDF |
| Get under an email or upload size limit | Compress PDF |
| Turn photos or scans into one PDF | JPG to PDF, PNG to PDF |
| Get pages as images for a slide or a post | PDF to JPG, PDF to PNG |
| Edit the text in Word | PDF to Word |
Jobs that need two tools
Sending a long statement with only the pages that matter: delete the rest, then compress if it is still too big. Building one application file from photos of documents and an existing PDF: turn the photos into a PDF with JPG to PDF, then merge the two.
What each kind of tool changes
Merge, split, rotate and delete pages copy pages as they are. Text stays selectable, fonts and images are untouched, and nothing is recompressed. Compression is the opposite: it recompresses the photos inside and leaves text alone, so a report with photos shrank by 19 to 32% depending on the level, while a text-only letter barely changed.
The converters do rebuild something. PDF to JPG and PDF to PNG draw each page as a picture, so the text can no longer be selected. PDF to Word rebuilds paragraphs, headings and simple tables from the text on the page. Scanned pages have no text to read, so they arrive in Word as images; the tool does no OCR.
Password-protected files
Merge, split, compress, rotate and delete pages cannot write encrypted PDFs, and say so instead of failing silently. Open the file in a PDF viewer and save or print a copy without the password. PDF to JPG, PDF to PNG and PDF to Word ask for the password and open the file with it.