Reference guide

PDF Privacy and Local Processing

PDFs often contain more than the text visible on screen. Understanding where a PDF is processed matters when documents include personal, business or confidential information.

What a PDF can contain

A PDF may contain document text, embedded images, form values, annotations, attachments, metadata and other structural information. That makes indiscriminate uploading undesirable for documents that were not intended to be shared with a third-party processor.

What local PDF processing changes

For operations such as merging, splitting or creating a PDF from images, browser libraries can perform the transformation on the user's device. The browser reads the selected files, creates the new document in memory and offers the result for download without requiring the source document to be sent to an application server.

Local does not mean careless

Users should still inspect the result before sharing it. Merging files can preserve content and metadata from source documents, while splitting pages does not necessarily sanitise every kind of embedded information. For highly sensitive material, use an appropriate document-security workflow rather than assuming a format conversion removes sensitive data.

Browser-based PDF tools

Merge PDF · Split PDF · JPG to PDF