Organize PDF

Every page is a thumbnail with its number under it. Drag one to where it belongs, or pick several and drag them together: the picked pages move as a group and keep their order. On a phone, hold a page for a moment, then drag it. The bar shows where it will land, and Esc puts it back.

Prefer the keyboard? Move around the pages with the arrow keys, press Space to pick, and hold Alt with the arrow keys to move the picked pages one place or one row. Buttons beside the pages move them to the start or the end, and Reverse flips the whole order, which is the quick fix for a stack that was scanned back to front.

Undo and Redo step back through every change you made here, so trying an order costs nothing. Nothing is saved until you press Save PDF.

Hover a page, or pick it on a touch screen, for its own buttons: turn it left or right, copy it, or remove it. Delete removes the picked pages from the keyboard. A copy sits right after the page it came from, so repeating a cover sheet or a form takes one click.

A removed page is gone from the saved PDF along with what it weighed. Our two-page test PDF is 55.5 KB because its pages are stored uncompressed; keeping only its second page gives a file of 6.3 KB. The original is never changed.

To remove pages by number, such as 2-5, use Remove pages from PDF; to pull a few pages out into their own file, use Extract pages from PDF. They are this tool with a different button.

Add blank page puts a blank page of the same size as its neighbour after the picked page, or at the end, ready to be dragged anywhere. Add pages opens the other PDFs in your list: pick the pages you want and they join the arrangement after the picked page.

That makes this the tool for stitching one PDF together from several: take the cover from one file, the middle from another, and keep the appendix from a third, in the order you choose. To simply join whole files end to end, Merge PDF is faster.

The PDF you arrange is edited as a whole rather than rebuilt, so text stays text you can select and search, and photos keep their original quality. Bookmarks that lead to pages you kept still lead to them, fillable form fields stay fillable, and links between pages you kept still jump to the right page. The title, author and dates stay too.

Bookmarks to pages you removed are dropped. Pages taken from another PDF, and extra copies of a page, arrive with their text, pictures and links, but not the other file’s bookmarks or form fields. A digital signature no longer checks out afterwards, as after any change to a signed file.

A PDF protected with a password can’t be opened here yet, and one whose owner doesn’t allow changing its pages says so; the others work as usual.