I build DonePDF, a free site with 90+ PDF tools. Most of them run entirely in the browser, which turned out to be handy for developer work: no upload, no account, and the file never leaves your machine.
Here are the ones I find most useful when PDFs show up in dev work, grouped by what you're trying to do.
π Get content out of a PDF
PDF to Markdown
Turns a PDF into GitHub-flavored Markdown: headings, paragraphs, lists and simple tables, with a live preview. Great for moving old docs into a repo or a wiki.
PDF to JSON
Text per page, document metadata and optional text coordinates. Pick the pages you need, and use OCR for scanned files. Useful when you need to feed PDF content into a script or a pipeline.
PDF to HTML
Either clean responsive text with headings and lists, or exact page images with selectable text on top.
π¨οΈ Generate PDFs
Markdown to PDF
README or docs to PDF with tables, task lists, code blocks, links and images. Set the page size and margins, and the text stays selectable.
HTML to PDF
Paste HTML or upload an .html file and get a PDF with CSS layout, web fonts, images and page breaks. Scripts in the HTML are never run.
JSON to PDF
Validates the JSON (with line and column on errors) and prints it as colored, pretty-printed code or as a key-path table. Handles files up to 30 MB.
π Debug and inspect PDFs
Compare PDF
Word-level text diff between two PDFs, plus added and removed pages, with overlay, swipe and difference views. Basically git diff for PDFs.
Validate PDF
Is the file structure intact? Are fonts embedded? Is it scanned, encrypted, or carrying scripts? You get a report without uploading anything.
Analyze PDF
Text per page, word and character counts, reading time, metadata, and search with hits per page.
Sanitize PDF
See and remove hidden data: author and properties, XMP metadata, attachments, embedded JavaScript, comments and form data. Worth running before you publish a PDF anywhere.
𧩠Small utilities
PDF to Base64
Encode a PDF as a Base64 string, optionally with the data:application/pdf;base64, prefix, for tests, fixtures or API payloads.
Base64 to PDF
The reverse: paste a Base64 string from a log or an API response and get the PDF back.
Repair PDF
Rebuilds a broken file structure and recovers the pages that can still be read, with a report of what was fixed.
π οΈ How it works under the hood
The browser-based tools are built on open-source libraries:
- pdf.js to read and render pages
- pdf-lib to write changes back into the PDF
- Fabric.js for the editing canvas in the online PDF editor
- Tesseract.js for OCR on scanned pages
A few heavier tools still run on the server, and their pages say so.
What PDF task do you still do by hand or with a script you'd rather not maintain? I'm always looking for the next tool to build, so let me know in the comments. π
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