All essentials

Drop a PDF and it opens right here — layers and all. Nothing is uploaded.

Free tool

PDF Viewer with Layers

View any PDF in your browser and toggle the layers a CAD export left in it — grid, dimensions, redlines, each one off or on. Page through, zoom, and save the view as a PNG. Nothing is uploaded.

Good to know

  • Layers are the PDF’s optional-content groups — what AutoCAD, Revit and Bluebeam write when the export is asked to include layer information. A flattened PDF has none, and the panel says so rather than looking broken.
  • Turning a layer off changes what is drawn on screen and in the saved PNG. The PDF itself is never rewritten — this tool only reads.
  • Nothing here goes through the editing library, so a PDF with permissions encryption opens even though Merge or Split would refuse it. A password-protected file still cannot be opened.

Your files stay on your machine

This tool runs entirely inside your browser tab. Nothing is uploaded, stored, or sent to a server — close the tab and every trace is gone.

These are the free ones — see the full suite

How big a file can it take?

There is no upload, so there is no upload limit — but the work happens in this tab, which means your browser’s memory is the budget. Nothing here will refuse a file for being large; a big enough one simply gets slow and, eventually, reloads the tab. The figures below are rules of thumb on a desktop browser, not enforced caps. On a phone or tablet, expect a good deal less.

  • One page is drawn at a time and thrown away on the next, so page count costs almost nothing — a 2,000-page volume opens as fast as a single sheet. What binds is file size, comfortable to roughly 200 MB.
  • Zoom raises the resolution of the page bitmap rather than magnifying it, so a large sheet at 400% is the heaviest thing this tool draws.

Password-protected PDFs are declined whatever their size — unlock the file first. If a run does die on a long document, splitting it into volumes and working through them one at a time is the reliable way round it.

Built on open source

The Essentials tools do their work in your browser using these open-source libraries, used under the licenses below. Each remains the copyright of its authors.

  • pdf-lib — MIT · creates and edits the PDFs you download
  • pdf.js — Apache-2.0 · reads your PDF and renders the page previews
  • SheetJS (xlsx) — Apache-2.0 · reads Excel workbooks — .xlsx, .xls, .xlsb and .ods
  • hyparquet — MIT · reads Apache Parquet files
  • hyparquet-compressors — MIT · the Parquet codecs beyond Snappy — Gzip, Zstd, Brotli, LZ4
  • JSZip — MIT · bundles multi-file results into one ZIP
  • Tesseract.js — Apache-2.0 · reads the text on scanned pages in OCR PDF, with its self-hosted engine and English data
  • exifr — MIT · reads photo dates, locations and orientation
  • geotiff.js — MIT · reads GeoTIFF elevation models
  • LERC — Apache-2.0 · decodes LERC-compressed GeoTIFFs, through geotiff.js
  • zstddec (with Zstandard) — MIT, BSD-3-Clause · decodes Zstandard-compressed GeoTIFFs, through geotiff.js
  • pako — MIT, Zlib · compresses and decompresses data inside pdf-lib, JSZip, PizZip and geotiff.js
  • shpjs — MIT · reads zipped Shapefiles
  • docxtemplater — MIT · fills the fields in Word templates
  • PizZip — MIT · opens Word templates for filling
  • jsdiff — BSD-3-Clause · finds the word changes in PDF Compare
  • msgreader — Apache-2.0 · reads Outlook .msg files
  • Lucide — ISC · the icons throughout these tools
  • React — MIT · the interface itself
  • Next.js — MIT · builds and serves these pages

pdf.js ships fallback fonts contributed by Foxit Software, redistributed here as part of pdf.js. JSZip is dual-licensed; it is used here under the MIT license.