11 New PDF Tools Just Landed in PDF Compresso

PDF Compresso started life as a compression tool, then grew into a small toolkit of eight essentials: merge, compress, split, protect, rotate, page numbers, watermark, and OCR. That was already enough for most people's day to day PDF work.

It was not enough for all of it. We kept getting the same requests: a way to reorder pages, a way to remove old password locks, a proper e-signature tool, something to fix a PDF that refuses to open. So we built them. PDF Compresso now has 19 tools in total, and all 11 new ones run under the exact same rules as the originals: everything processes locally on your device, nothing gets uploaded anywhere, and it is still one payment of £24.99 rather than a new subscription tier.

Here is a proper tour of what just shipped.

What's New at a Glance

• Organize, reorder, delete, and rearrange pages across one or more PDFs
• Unlock, remove printing, copying, and editing restrictions from a PDF
• Sign, draw, type, or upload a signature and add text, dates, or checkmarks
• Repair, attempt to recover a PDF that won't open or displays incorrectly
• Flatten, lock in form fields, signatures, and annotations so they can't be edited
• Redact, permanently destroy sensitive content rather than just cover it
• Image to PDF, turn JPGs, PNGs, or WebP files into a single PDF
• PDF to Images, export every page as a high quality PNG or JPEG
• Extract Images, pull the original embedded images out, byte for byte
• Extract Text, near instant text extraction for PDFs that already have a text layer
• Metadata & PDF/A, edit document properties and export archival PDF/A files

Cleaning Up and Locking Down Your Pages

Three of the new tools deal with the shape and structure of a document rather than its content.

Organize lets you reorder, delete, and rearrange pages, and you can pull pages in from more than one file to build a new document from scratch. It sits right next to Merge on the main app page, since the two often get used together.

Unlock does the opposite of Protect. If you have a PDF with printing, copying, or editing restrictions on it, this strips them out so you can use the document freely. Obviously this only makes sense for files you have the right to unlock, not someone else's protected document.

Flatten takes any form fields, signatures, or annotations sitting on a PDF and bakes them permanently into the page. Once a document is flattened, nobody can accidentally (or deliberately) change the values in a filled-in form. It's a small tool, but a genuinely useful one before you send a signed contract or a completed form somewhere official.

Putting Your Name on It

Sign was probably the most requested addition. You can draw a signature with your mouse or trackpad, type your name in a script style font, or upload an image of your actual signature. Alongside the signature itself, you can drop in typed text, dates, and checkmarks anywhere on the page. Since it runs locally, your signature never gets stored on a server somewhere. It stays on your device, the same as everything else.

Fixing What's Broken

Repair attempts to recover PDFs that won't open, show blank pages, or throw errors in other readers. This one comes with something most repair tools skip: an honest pre-check. Before it does anything, PDF Compresso looks at whether your file already opens normally and tells you what to expect. If the file opens fine, repair might still help with subtle structural issues. If it fails to open, repair is likely to help. Either way, you get a straight answer instead of a tool that just claims success no matter what.

We wrote a full walkthrough of how this works if you want the details: How to Repair a Corrupted PDF.

Redacting the Right Way

Redact permanently removes sensitive content from a PDF instead of just drawing a box over it. A lot of free tools let you place a black rectangle on top of text, which looks redacted but leaves the original text sitting underneath, fully recoverable by anyone who knows to select and copy it. PDF Compresso's redaction flattens the affected pages to images with the black boxes burned in, so the underlying content is genuinely destroyed. Pages without redactions keep their original quality and stay fully searchable.

This is a big enough topic that it gets its own article: How to Redact a PDF Properly.

Getting Content In and Out

Four tools handle moving content between formats. Image to PDF and PDF to Images convert in either direction, useful for turning a stack of scanned receipts into one document, or pulling a slide deck's pages out as images for a presentation. Extract Images pulls the original embedded images out of a PDF exactly as they were placed in, not a screenshot of what's on the page. Extract Text gives you a fast, clean text extraction for any PDF that already has a real text layer, no OCR step required.

Keeping Records Straight

Metadata & PDF/A lets you view and edit a document's Title, Author, Subject, Keywords, Creator, and Producer fields, which is handy if a PDF was generated with the wrong details baked in. The same tool also exports PDF/A-1b and PDF/A-2b files for anyone who needs archival grade documents for long term storage or legal compliance.

Still No Uploads, Still One Payment

None of this changes how PDF Compresso actually works. Every one of these 11 tools processes your files locally, so nothing is uploaded to a server while you work. There is no new subscription tier and no feature paywalled behind a higher tier. It is still a single £24.99 payment for the desktop app, with all 19 tools included and a 14 day free trial to try them first.

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• How to Redact a PDF Properly
• How to Repair a Corrupted PDF
• PDF Compresso vs Every Major PDF Tool
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