What this does

This joins two or more PDFs into a single file. You choose the order, and you can take just some pages from each one — the first three of a contract, say, plus a signature page from another. What comes out is an ordinary PDF that opens anywhere.

The merging happens inside this page. The usual way to combine PDFs online is to upload them to a company's server, wait in a queue, and trust that the files are deleted afterwards — for a bank statement, a signed contract or a passport scan, that's a lot of trust for a job that takes a second. Here the files are read, joined and saved by your own browser, so there's no upload, no queue, no size limit beyond your own memory, and no watermark.

How to merge PDFs

Drop your files onto the box, or click to pick several at once.
Put them in order: drag a file by its page preview, or use the arrows on the right.
If you only want part of a file, type the pages in its Pages box — for example 1-3, 8.
Press Merge and download.

Choosing pages

Leave the box empty and the whole file goes in. Otherwise write page numbers and ranges separated by commas: 2, 1-5, 1-3, 7, 9-12. An open-ended range works too — 4- means page four to the end, and -3 means the start up to page three.

Two things you can do with that which most merge tools won't let you. Pages come out in the order you write them, so 3, 1, 2 reorders as well as selects. And repeats are kept, so 1, 5, 1 puts page one in twice — which is how you put a cover sheet on the front and the back.

What is kept, and what isn't

Page content comes across exactly: text stays selectable, images stay at their original resolution, and each page keeps its own size and rotation, so a landscape page mixed in with portrait ones stays landscape. Nothing is re-compressed, so the merged file is roughly the sum of its parts and no quality is lost.

Some things don't survive, and it's better to know now than after sending the file. Bookmarks and the table of contents are not carried over. Form fields lose their interactivity and appear as their current contents. Links that point to a page within the same document may not land in the right place, since the page numbers have changed. Digital signatures are invalidated — unavoidably, because a signature attests to a file that no longer exists once it's been combined with another.

Document metadata is deliberately dropped. The merged file carries no title, author or producer from the originals, and none from this tool either.

Is it private?

Yes, and on this tool it's the whole point. Your PDFs are never uploaded — they're read by JavaScript in this page, combined in memory, and handed back to you as a download. You can check by opening your browser's network panel while you work, or by disconnecting from the internet after the page loads: everything still works.

Frequently asked questions

How many files can I merge?

As many as your browser can hold in memory at once. Dozens of ordinary documents are no trouble; a few hundred megabytes of scans will start to feel it, and on a phone rather sooner than on a laptop.

Why won't my password-protected PDF open?

Because it's encrypted, and this tool has no way to unlock it — which is the correct behaviour for something that never sends your file anywhere to be decrypted. Open it in a PDF reader with the password, save an unprotected copy, and merge that. Files that merely restrict printing are encrypted too, and are turned away for the same reason.

Can I reorder pages within a file?

Yes — that's what the page box does. Write 3, 1, 2 and those pages go in in that order. You can also add the same file twice with different page ranges if you need to interleave it with another.

Does it work on a phone?

Yes. Choosing files works as it does in any app, and the arrows reorder the list where dragging is fiddly. Very large scans are the one thing to be careful of — a phone has less memory to work with.

Will the merged file be huge?

It's about the sum of the originals, since nothing is re-encoded. Shared resources such as repeated fonts are only stored once, so it's often slightly smaller than the total.