Frequently asked questions

Yes. Every PDF tool is free with no daily limits and no watermarks. Because that work runs in your browser, it costs us almost nothing, so we don’t need to charge for it. (Our separate barcode generator renders on our servers and has a fair-use daily limit of 20 free downloads.)

No, never, by any PDF tool on this site. Your PDFs are opened and processed entirely inside your browser tab, never sent to or stored on any server. We couldn’t look at your files even if we wanted to. The one exception in the Plume family is the barcode generator: it renders on our servers and is labeled that way on its page, and even there, only the barcode text reaches us, never your documents.

No. Just open a tool and start. No Plume tool needs a sign-up today.

There’s no hard limit. Plume never uploads your files, so size is bounded only by your device’s memory. Merging, splitting and rotating stay quick even at a few hundred MB, because those tools rewrite the file without re-rendering a single page. The ones that read every page (OCR, Compress, PDF to Word) need far more memory, so a very large scan can be slow, or run out of room, on an older phone.

Yes. After your first visit, Plume itself opens without a connection. Every page is saved to your browser, and each tool finishes caching the first time it loads, so a tool you’ve opened once keeps working fully offline. Your PDFs are processed on your device, never on a server (the barcode generator is the one tool that needs a connection, since it renders server-side). You can even install Plume from your browser’s menu and use it like an app on a plane.

The difference is what's missing. Nothing you open gets uploaded, you never hit a sign-up wall, the result has no watermark, and there's no two-a-day cap. Same tools you already use, minus the accounts and limits.

Yes. Open the Edit PDF tool and click any existing text to retype it right in place. Or use find & replace to swap a word or phrase across the whole document at once. You can also add new text, images, highlights, shapes, whiteout, freehand drawing and links, plus fill forms, sign, add page numbers, watermark, and reorder, rotate or delete pages. All of it runs on your device. Nothing is uploaded. Two honest limits: scanned PDFs (pictures of text) can't be text-edited yet without OCR, and if a line's original font is missing a character you type, that line switches to a standard font. We tell you when that happens.

Yes. The OCR PDF tool recognizes the printed text in a scanned PDF and adds an invisible, selectable layer on top of each page. The scan looks exactly the same, but you can now search it and copy from it. The recognition runs entirely on your device: the OCR engine downloads into your browser once, and the scan itself is never uploaded anywhere. It reads printed text in 7 languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch. One honest caveat: it works best on clean, printed scans. Handwriting, blurry photos and very low-resolution pages may come out patchy, and the tool tells you when a page looks too rough to read reliably.

Yes. Permanently. The Redact PDF tool doesn't just paint a black box over the words; it deletes the underlying text and image objects from the file, then draws the box on top. So there's nothing left to copy, search or recover. You can open the downloaded PDF, try to select the redacted area, and confirm the text is genuinely gone. That covers scanned pages too: there the black is baked into the scan's image itself, so the covered pixels are destroyed, not just hidden. It all happens in your browser, so the sensitive file is never uploaded. In the rare case the tool can't fully clear a region (some unusual embedded text or scan formats), it tells you instead of pretending the area is safe.

Text never does. Compression only re-encodes the photos and scanned images inside the file, so text, fonts and layout stay exactly as they were and text stays selectable. On the Balanced level photos look near-identical; Strong shrinks them harder and they soften slightly. The High quality level is fully lossless.

Savings come from the photos and scans inside a PDF. If yours is mostly text (or its images are already well compressed) there’s little left to take, and that’s a good sign, not a failure. Plume tells you honestly instead of inventing a number, and it never gives you back a bigger file than you started with. For stubborn files, try the Strong level, or the Extreme option if you don’t mind text becoming non-selectable.