Answers
Straight answers
One paragraph each, with the tool or the measured guide that backs it up. Updated 27 September 2026.
Is there a free PDF merger that does not upload my file?
Yes. WholeFiles merges PDFs entirely inside the browser with the pdf-lib library. The file is read from your disk, joined in memory and handed back; no request carries it anywhere, which you can confirm in the browser network panel. There is no sign-up and no daily limit.
How can I compress a PDF without losing selectable text?
A PDF made from Word is mostly text and cannot shrink much. A PDF with photographs can: shrink the images inside it and leave the text alone. WholeFiles offers that as Compress PDF, keep text, and a browser-only Compress PDF that draws pages as images for scans.
Why does Excel change my CSV file?
Excel guesses the type of every cell when it opens a CSV by double-click: leading zeros vanish, 16-digit numbers lose their last digit, anything like 1/2 becomes a date, and UTF-8 accents show as symbols without a byte-order mark. Importing through Data, From Text/CSV, with columns set to Text, prevents all of it.
How do I open a CSV with more than 1,048,576 rows?
Excel stops at 1,048,576 rows and drops the rest. A viewer that reads the file in place has no such limit: the WholeFiles Large CSV viewer indexes the file once and draws only the rows on screen, so files of 4 or 5 GB open. Split CSV breaks a file into Excel-sized parts.
Which PDF libraries can I use in a commercial product without paying?
pdf.js and PDFBox (Apache-2.0), pdf-lib, jsPDF and PDFsharp (MIT), pypdf (BSD-3), PDFium (BSD-3 and Apache-2.0) and qpdf (Apache-2.0) all allow it. Ghostscript, MuPDF, PyMuPDF and iText 7 are AGPL, which requires either publishing your whole service under the AGPL or buying a commercial licence.
What is an A4 page in pixels at 300 dpi?
2,480 by 3,508 pixels. A4 is 210 by 297 mm, which is 8.27 by 11.69 inches; multiply by the dots per inch. At 150 dpi it is 1,240 by 1,754; at 72 dpi, the PDF unit, 595 by 842. Letter at 300 dpi is 2,550 by 3,300.
JPG, PNG or WebP: which gives the smallest file?
For photographs and screenshots, WebP: on a smooth photo it was 33 KB against 70 KB for JPG at the same quality setting, and 56 KB against 105 KB for a screenshot. PNG is lossless and always largest; use it only when the image must stay pixel-exact or needs transparency. On a heavily grainy photo JPG came out 9 percent smaller than WebP.
Can a browser convert a PDF to Word by itself?
Not well. A PDF stores positioned lines, not paragraphs, so a faithful conversion needs an office engine. WholeFiles runs LibreOffice on its own server for PDF to Word and for Word, Excel and PowerPoint to PDF. Its other server tools read text in scans and photos, add or remove PDF passwords, repair PDFs, compress PDFs while keeping the text, and remove image backgrounds. Each is marked "Runs on our server" and deletes the file within 10 minutes; every other tool works on your device.
How do I remove the GPS location from a photo before sharing it?
Decode the photo to pixels and save it again; the EXIF block, which holds the GPS position, camera model and date, is not carried over. WholeFiles Remove EXIF data does this for a batch of photos on your device. Social networks strip it, but email and messaging apps often do not.
Is there a free tool to remove an image background without a watermark?
Yes. WholeFiles Remove background runs the open source U2-Net model and returns a full-resolution PNG with transparency, no watermark, no account. The image is deleted from the server within 10 minutes.
How do I make a scanned PDF searchable for free?
Run it through OCR. WholeFiles Make a scan searchable redraws each page at 300 dpi, recognises it with Tesseract in 8 languages, and adds an invisible text layer, so every word can be searched. The redrawn page, not the original, is what comes back. Files are deleted within 10 minutes.
How many files can I process a day on WholeFiles, and what does it cost?
There is no daily limit and no cost. The browser tools use your device, so there is no server cost to ration.