About PDFMason

What PDFMason is

PDFMason is two things that share one rule. The first is an Android app: a PDF editor that changes the text already inside a document — the original words on the page, not a text box drawn over them — and that also finds and replaces text across a document, compares the text of two files, protects files with a password, and repairs damaged ones. The second is the set of twelve browser tools on this site for page-level work: merging, splitting, extracting and organizing pages, converting to and from images, and adding signatures, page numbers and watermarks.

The browser tools are free and run entirely in your browser tab. The Android app is on Google Play and in early access — every feature, including editing existing text, OCR and PDF-to-Office conversion, is free during that period, and this page will say so if it changes. Text editing in the browser is not planned: the web tools work on whole pages, not on the words inside them.

Why everything runs on your device

Documents are among the most private files people own: contracts, medical letters, payslips, identity papers. The usual trade in this category asks you to upload a confidential file to someone else’s server in order to rotate a page. PDFMason exists to remove that trade. The browser tools run locally using JavaScript PDF libraries and browser APIs. There is no document upload endpoint on this site. The page’s Content-Security-Policy restricts connections to this origin; page assets and first-party usage events may still use the network. You can inspect requests in DevTools while processing a sample PDF.

Local processing has a second benefit unrelated to privacy: the tools keep working without a network connection and do not depend on anyone’s server staying up. The Android app processes documents on the phone. Optional usage statistics are separate: they use Firebase Analytics after explicit consent, as described in the app privacy policy. Offline document processing does not mean the app has no network permission.

This website itself is static — a set of files served from Cloudflare Pages. Usage is counted by a first-party, anonymous beacon that records event names and page paths; the privacy policy lists every field. No third-party analytics, advertising scripts or fonts are loaded from any other domain.

Known limitations

Product pages list what a tool does. This section lists what PDFMason does not do, in the same words we use internally. A limit stated plainly is better than one discovered on an important document.

• Encrypted PDFs in the browser. The browser tools can't open password-protected PDFs. The Android app can.
• OCR, compression and PDF-to-Word in the browser. No OCR, no compression, no PDF-to-Word in the browser — yet. We'd rather ship nothing than ship a version that doesn't work.
• Straight-line and arrow annotations. We tested it on real documents: it only writes correctly to 33% of them. So it's not in v1.
• Saving very large documents. A 1,136-page document takes 24–32 seconds to save with verification. It runs in the background and you can cancel it.
• Comparing files. Compare works on the text layer, not the pixels: images, formatting-only changes and paragraphs that merely moved are not compared — two files that look different but read the same may show no differences.
• Find and replace. A replacement that would overflow its frame is flagged and left unchanged rather than silently shrunk — you decide per match, and scanned or low-confidence pages are listed as out of reach instead of edited blindly.
• Camera scanning. Camera scanning uses Google’s document scanner, so it appears only on devices with Google Play services, a camera and enough free memory; everywhere else the entry is hidden and photos can be imported instead.
• Repairing damaged files. Repair rebuilds damaged pages but drops interactive forms, annotations, links, bookmarks, signatures and attachments, and cannot promise that missing content comes back.

Contact, funding and the team

This section is deliberately short on claims. The verifiable facts: this website is hosted on Cloudflare Pages; usage counting is first-party and anonymous and fully described in the privacy policy; there are no advertisements, no third-party scripts, and no cookies for access. Nothing on this site asks for your name.

There is no support desk to phone or chat with. Questions about the Android app go to the developer contact shown on its Google Play page. The only form on this site is the optional iPhone-version notice on the download page, which asks for an email address and nothing else.