How to Edit, Merge, and Split PDFs With Free Online Tools

More than 30 years after Adobe came up with it, the PDF file—portable document format—remains essential for archiving, sharing, and publishing. It's a file type that can be opened by just about anyone on virtually any mobile or desktop device, while preserving the formatting, colors, and layout of the original document.

Given the ubiquity and popularity of the PDF, it's no surprise that commercial PDF software tools are in high demand. But you don't necessarily have to pay to process these documents, especially for basic editing operations.

A host of PDF tools are available on the web that will let you quickly and easily manipulate your documents for free (with more advanced features and usage limits available for a price). There's nothing to download, nothing to install, and nothing to pay, and they're perfect for small-scale edits.

We've picked three of the best online PDF app suites below, together with three common tasks you can do with them. While these sites are all well established and reputable, use some common sense with the documents you share. Be wary about using a cloud service for editing files containing sensitive info.

Edit PDFs With TinyWow

Head over to TinyWow in your web browser and you'll see there are plenty of PDF tools to pick from, from converters to compressors. Here we're going to show you how to apply some basic edits to a document, so click Edit PDF and then select Upload from PC or Mobile to pick the file you want to work with.

You'll find the page navigator on the left, the zoom controls in the top right, and your editing tools along the top. Click Text, for example, and you can drop in new text on top of your PDF, using a font, size, and color of your choice. The editor also lets you click on existing text already in the PDF to edit it.

Select the Highlight or Shapes tools to annotate your PDF: You can add a colored highlight to any text in the document, and drop in arrows, lines, circles, and rectangles. Whenever you create a new object or select an existing object, you'll see a dialog pop up that enables you to customize, move, and delete the object.

The Image tool is useful as well, enabling you to drop in a picture stored on your device—you get handles at the sides of the image for changing its size on the page. When you're happy with the way your edited PDF is looking, click Download (top right) to save it, or Start Over to start again.

Merge PDFs With iLovePDF

The iLovePDF site has a broad selection of PDF tools, similar to TinyWow. You can turn PDFs into Microsoft Office files, convert PDFs into images or vice versa, edit PDFs in detail, and even sign and watermark PDFs. For now we're going to concentrate on merging PDFs: Click Merge PDF from the options to get started.

First, you need to click Select PDF files to choose the PDFs you want to stitch together, from the device you're using. No upper limit for files is stated, though I was able to combine 11 PDFs without any problem. You can also drag and drop the file thumbnails around to change their order, or click the arrow or cross on any PDF to rotate or remove them, respectively.

When you've got all of your PDFs loaded and in the order you need them to be in, click Merge PDF to package them together into a single file. After a few moments (depending on the number of pages), the operation will be completed. Click Download merged PDF to save the finished file, or wait for the automatic download prompt to appear.

Split PDFs With Smallpdf

The opposite of merging PDFs is, of course, splitting them, which gives us a chance to showcase the Smallpdf suite of web apps. As with the other PDF tool portals covered above, there's an extensive choice of utilities available, covering everything from cropping PDFs down to size to turning Word documents into PDFs.

Click Tools at the top, then Split PDF to get started. Use the Choose files button to pick one or more PDFs that you want to split. This takes you to the main editing interface. Every page of the selected PDF is shown as a thumbnail, and you can click any of the scissor buttons to create a split—splits can include single or multiple pages.

You can also use the Split after every … option at the top to automatically split the PDF into sections based on the number of pages you want in each one. There are buttons at the top for rotating pages, and you're able to change the order of the pages by dragging and dropping the thumbnails. When you've got the splits in the right place, click Split PDFs to save your pages individually as PDFs or as a zip file.