Stapler — Offline PDF Tools

Stapler is a complete PDF toolkit that never leaves your browser — no uploads, no accounts, no server, ever. Most "free PDF tools" online quietly send your file to a server you'll never see, then ask you to sign up to get it back. Stapler works differently: every merge, every redaction, every signature is computed on your own machine, inside the extension's own page. Your documents never touch a network — not ours, not anyone's. Organize & edit — Merge, split, and extract pages. Rotate, delete, duplicate, and reorder. Crop, insert, and remove blank pages. Normalize mixed page sizes. Build N-up layouts and booklets. Add bookmarks, page numbers, watermarks, Bates stamps, and QR/barcode stamps. Convert — Images (PNG/JPEG/HEIC) to PDF and back. PDF to plain text or Markdown. Markdown to PDF. Extract embedded images and tables. PDF to and from Word, Excel and PowerPoint, in beta: these conversions are best-effort, keep text and basic structure, and do not reproduce complex layouts exactly. Sign & fill — Draw, type, or import a signature. Fill and flatten interactive form (AcroForm) fields. Protect & clean up — Real redaction: the underlying content is structurally removed from the file, not just painted over, with a verification pass before you save. Scrub metadata. Straighten, deskew, and clean up phone-camera scans of paper documents. Compress — Shrink file size with a raster pass or a surgical re-encode that keeps text sharp — and never inflates a file that's already optimized. Review & manage — Annotate with highlights, freehand marks, sticky notes, and whiteout. Compare two documents side by side. Batch-process a whole folder with a saved recipe. Built with accessibility in mind: keyboard operation is designed into every tool, and the interface comes in light and dark mode. It is available in 11 languages (English plus 10 translations, including Arabic); the translations have not yet been reviewed by native speakers, and the right-to-left layout is still being checked, so expect rough edges there. Privacy, proven — not promised No network requests while you work, with one opt-in exception: OCR needs a language model (about 3 MB for English, 1.4 MB more for Hindi) that is not bundled. Stapler asks first, then downloads it once from a pinned address on the jsDelivr CDN, checks its SHA-256 hash and keeps it on your device; that download shows jsDelivr your IP address and browser, and nothing about your documents. You can load the model from a file instead. Verify it yourself: open DevTools' Network tab and use any tool other than a first OCR run — nothing appears. Zero permissions in the install prompt. Chrome won't even show you a warning, because there's nothing to warn about. No accounts, no tracking, no analytics, no watermarks, no upload, no quota, no daily limit. Your device's memory is the practical limit (past 1.5 GB of open files Stapler asks before opening more), plus a few caps that keep a tab from freezing: up to 20 documents open at once, 200 MB per image for resize-to-size, 256 MB uncompressed per Word/Excel/PowerPoint file, the first 50 sheets (1,000 rows × 32 columns each) of a spreadsheet, 500 slides per presentation and 1,000,000 characters of Markdown; Compare gives a coarser word diff past 200,000 words per side. A file over a cap is refused with a message, and anything a cap leaves out of a conversion is reported, never dropped silently. What Stapler does keep is on your device only — open-document copies for session recovery, saved signatures, recipes, the folder-search index, OCR models and preferences — and one button clears it all (see the privacy policy). Open source under the MIT licence — read every line of the code that touches your files. We built the tool we wanted for our own sensitive documents: something that just works, and never has to ask where your files are going — because they aren't going anywhere.