Protect, compress and repair PDFs

Passwords, added and removed

Protect puts a password on a PDF so it can't be opened without it — worth doing before emailing anything with personal or financial detail, since email itself offers no protection in transit.

Unlock removes a password from a document you can already open. It is for files you own or are entitled to access — a statement from your own bank, an old document whose protection is now just a nuisance. It is not a password cracker and won't open a file you don't have the password for.

Smaller files, and damaged ones

Compress rebuilds the PDF more efficiently, removing redundant data and restructuring how it stores its contents. Text-heavy documents often shrink substantially. Image-heavy ones see less benefit, because the images are usually already compressed — the tool tells you the before and after so you can judge.

Repair attempts to rescue a PDF that won't open, by rebuilding the internal structure that tells a reader where everything is. It can't recover data that isn't there, but a surprising number of 'corrupted' PDFs are simply files with a damaged index, and those often come back intact.

Local processing, including compression

Every one of these runs inside your browser. Compression in particular is worth noting — most online compressors upload your file, process it on their servers and return a link, meaning your document has been copied to a machine you don't control.

Here the rebuild happens locally. A password-protected document never has its password transmitted, and a confidential file being compressed for email never leaves your computer in the first place.

All 4 tools on this page

• ProtectAdd a password to a PDF
• UnlockRemove a password you know
• CompressReduce the file size
• RepairRebuild a damaged PDF

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