PDF Toolkit — support

It will not open my PDF

Three kinds of file it cannot use, and it says which, in red, at the top of the page:

• Locked PDFs. The toolkit cannot open a file that carries password protection, even one that opens elsewhere without asking. Print it to a new PDF from any viewer, or remove the protection in the app that made it, then try again.
• Files that are not PDFs. A scan saved as a JPEG with a .pdf name, for instance. Open it in a PDF app and save it as a real PDF first.
• Damaged files. If nothing else can open it either, the file is broken.

If it is a normal PDF and it was refused, that is a bug and worth reporting. Do not send the file if it is private; the error message on screen is enough.

A very large file is slow, or the tab runs out of memory

Everything happens inside your browser's memory, and there is no cap in the toolkit itself.

Measured in September 2026: a scan of about 490 MB, 80 photographed pages, opened in about three seconds and came back out complete in under ten, on a Mac and on a Linux PC. So "large" is bigger than most people expect.

What we have not measured is where it stops. Handling that file took roughly 2 GB of the tab's memory — about four times the file's size — and a browser tab generally has about 4 GB to work with. That points at somewhere near 1 GB as the practical ceiling, but it is an estimate, not a measurement. If a file that big will not open, split it in two elsewhere first and work on the halves.

The thumbnail is blank but the page is there

Some pages use fonts or images the preview cannot draw. The download still contains the real page. Open the downloaded file to check.

The pages came out in the wrong order

The order on screen is the order in the file. Drag pages, or use the arrow buttons, then download again. Nothing is changed on disk until you download.

Is it really free?

Yes. Every feature — merge, split, split into a zip, rotate, reorder, delete, watermark, page numbers, title and author — is free, with no limit on files, pages or downloads. There is no account to make and nothing to pay.

Something else

PDF Toolkit is made by Winning Beans, United Kingdom. support@winningbeans.co.uk