1Upload the PDF documents you want to read — nothing is installed and no reader application is needed.
2Page through the document, zoom, and search inside it wherever the file carries a real text layer.
3Select and copy any text you need straight out of the rendered page.
4Close the tab when you are finished; the uploaded PDF file is deleted from the workers shortly afterwards.
PDF Reader FAQ
Does the format affect what the reader can show?
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It does. PDF fixes the page: fonts, vectors, raster images and text coordinates are frozen so every reader sees identical layout. Layout fidelity comes directly from how the format stores the page.
Anything specific to PDF here?
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Yes — a PDF is an object graph, not a page image, so text stays selectable and vectors stay sharp no matter what happens to the raster content inside it. It explains what is preserved on screen.
How does PDF Reader display the file?
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Concretely, the document is rendered page by page in the browser with its text layer intact, so you can search and select without downloading anything or installing a reader. Nothing is installed and nothing is downloaded to open it.
Can I search inside the document?
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Yes, wherever the file has a real text layer. A scanned document that has never been through text recognition is a picture of words as far as any reader is concerned, and will not be searchable until it is OCR'd.
Do bookmarks, links and form fields survive?
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Outlines, internal links and annotations are preserved wherever the operation allows it. Digital signatures are the exception: any change to the file necessarily invalidates a signature, because that is precisely what a signature is for.
What can I upload to PDF Reader?
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Any standard PDF, including ones produced by a scanner, by a word processor or by a print driver. Files with an owner password that only restricts editing are handled; files that need a user password to open are not, and we do not attempt to break encryption.
Is there a file size limit on PDF Reader?
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Yes: free accounts process documents up to 5 MB each, which covers most reports and contracts but not a long scanned document at 600 DPI; Ghostscript and qpdf do the work. Scanned PDFs are the usual thing that exceeds it, and compressing the document first is normally enough to bring it back under.
Will PDF Reader lower the quality of my PDF documents?
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Text and vector artwork are objects rather than pixels, so they stay perfectly sharp at any zoom no matter what happens. Only the embedded raster images can degrade, and only if the operation you chose resamples them.
Why would a modern-format site run PDF Reader?
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WEBP.to is built around the modern replacement for both of the old defaults: one format that does lossy, lossless, alpha and animation, and reliably lands smaller than the JPEG or PNG it came from. People arrive here having decided the old defaults are costing them bandwidth, and that decision immediately raises the rest: what size, what quality, what happens to the transparency. PDF Reader is on the same upload and the same account so those questions get answered in one place.
Once PDF Reader has run, what is worth doing next?
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The converter on this site moves images to and from WebP, PNG, JPG and AVIF, which is where you decide whether a smaller file is worth losing the older browsers. Doing it in that order matters: pick the pixels first and the container afterwards, because the container is the cheap decision and the pixels are the expensive one.
Do the sibling sites run something different?
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The engines are identical — same libraries, same workers, same caps. What is different is the opinion attached, and the opinion here rests on a property of the format this site is named after: the same .webp extension can hold a lossy VP8 frame, a lossless one, or an animation, so the sensible processing path is decided per file rather than per extension.
What happens to my file, and is an account required?
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No account, and nothing is retained: uploads are deleted from the workers shortly after the job finishes, and nothing is inspected, listed or indexed. Accounts exist for history and batch size only.
