burrow

Your files stay on this computer.

burrow is a set of PDF tools that run inside your browser. When you open a file here, it is read by code running on your own machine. It is never sent anywhere, because there is nowhere to send it: burrow is a static site with no server that could receive a file.

this computer

  1. your filestays here
  2. burrowWebAssembly
  3. the resultyou save it

everywhere else

nothing

no upload, no account, no record of what you open

Nothing crosses the dashed line. The page itself is downloaded from a server, like any page — that happens before you choose a file, and nothing is requested afterwards.

What works today

Four tools: merge, split, rotate and reorder. Each one is linked below, and a tool is only linked here once its page ships — there is no sign-up to wait on and nothing is announced before it works.

burrow is being built in the open and is not finished. Compress is still to come, and so is redaction, which is the one this project is most careful about. What is here has the safety work around it done: every operation checks its own output before handing it to you, and refuses it rather than give you a document that is quietly wrong.

The tools being built

Merge PDF
Combine several PDFs into one, in the order you choose.
Split PDF
Cut a PDF into separate files, at the pages you choose.
Rotate PDF
Turn pages that were scanned the wrong way up.
Reorder PDF
Move pages around without losing any of them.
Compress PDF
Store a PDF more efficiently, without re-encoding anything.

How you can check any of this

Open your browser's developer tools, go to the network tab, and use burrow. After the page and its engines have loaded, you will see no further requests — not while a file is open, not when one finishes. The same thing is asserted on every commit, in three browsers, by a test that reads the web server's own log rather than the browser's report of it.

The code is public, and so is the reasoning behind it: the architecture decisions are written down, including the ones that turned out to be wrong.