PDFForge: 30+ PDF Tools That Never See Your Files

Think about what's in the PDFs you handle: contracts, salary slips, medical reports, ID scans. Now think about uploading them to a random website to merge two pages. That trade-off always bothered me, and PDFForge is the answer: a suite of 30+ professional PDF tools — merge, split, compress, convert, rotate, watermark, sign, protect, OCR and more — where every operation runs client-side in your browser. Files never leave your device, which also means no upload limits, no waiting on servers, and tools that work offline once loaded. In this post I explain the engineering that makes browser-side PDF processing possible: WebAssembly-powered libraries, canvas rendering for conversions, and in-browser OCR for scanned documents. I also cover the product architecture — a clean tool-grid interface where every task is one click away — and the performance work required to handle large files in a browser tab. Privacy-first isn't a marketing line here; it's the technical foundation. If you handle sensitive documents or you're curious what modern browsers can really do, this breakdown shows how far client-side processing has come.