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-libMIT · creates and edits the PDFs you download
  • pdf.jsApache-2.0 · reads your PDF and renders the page previews
  • SheetJS (xlsx)Apache-2.0 · reads Excel workbooks — .xlsx, .xls, .xlsb and .ods
  • hyparquetMIT · reads Apache Parquet files
  • hyparquet-compressorsMIT · the Parquet codecs beyond Snappy — Gzip, Zstd, Brotli, LZ4
  • JSZipMIT · bundles multi-file results into one ZIP
  • LucideISC · the icons throughout these tools
  • ReactMIT · the interface itself
  • Next.jsMIT · 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.