About this tool
A PDF arrives and you need to read two pages of it, or find one clause in a forty-page contract. The obvious move is to open it in whatever PDF viewer the browser or operating system offers — but those viewers behave differently on every device, some strip the text layer, and on a locked-down work machine you may not have one installed at all.
This viewer opens the file inside the browser tab and draws each page onto a canvas, then lays an invisible text layer on top so you can select, copy and search the words. The file is read straight from your disk: there is no upload step, no temporary server copy and nothing to delete afterwards.
It is deliberately a reader, not an editor. If you need to change the document afterwards, the other tools on this site take over from there — rotate a sideways page, delete a page you did not mean to send, or compress the file before attaching it to an email.
How to view a PDF
- 1 Drop a PDF onto the panel or browse for it. The first pages appear as soon as they are rendered.
- 2 Scroll to read, or use the page box to jump to a specific page. Zoom fits the page to the window by default.
- 3 Press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) to search inside the document, then click a result to jump to it.
- 4 Use the sidebar to move between pages by thumbnail, and download the original file whenever you need a copy.
Good to know
- Text has to exist in the file to be selectable. A scanned document is a picture of a page, so search finds nothing in it — that needs OCR, which is a different job.
- Password-protected PDFs must have the password removed before they can be opened here.
- Very large documents are rendered lazily: only the pages near the screen are drawn, so a few hundred pages scroll smoothly instead of freezing the tab.
Frequently asked questions
Is the PDF uploaded anywhere?
No. The file is read with the File API and parsed by a PDF engine running inside your browser tab. No copy is sent to a server, which is why the page works with the network disconnected after it has loaded.
Can I copy text out of the PDF?
Yes, whenever the PDF contains a real text layer. Drag to select and copy as usual. Documents produced by a scanner contain only images, so there is no text to copy until they are run through OCR.
Why does search not find a word I can see on the page?
The search reads the text layer, not the pixels. If the page was scanned, or the text was converted to outlines in a design tool, the words are shapes rather than characters and cannot be searched.
Does the viewer change my file?
No. Opening a document never writes to it, and the download button returns the original bytes unchanged. Anything you do in the other tools produces a new file instead of modifying the source.
How large a PDF can it open?
Files up to 500 MB open in a desktop browser; past that the tool stops before the tab runs out of memory. A phone will struggle much earlier. Pages are rendered on demand to keep memory use down.