Guides

These are written to be the complete answer to a question people keep asking, not to sell a tool. Each one stands on its own: if you never use anything on this site, the guide should still have been worth reading. Where a tool here is genuinely the answer it gets linked, and where something else is better (a command-line tool, a setting on your phone, a paid app) that gets said too.

They exist because the standard answers to these questions are three sentences long and frequently wrong. How to tell whether a website is uploading your file, why removing a PDF restriction takes a second rather than an hour, why an iPhone photo will not open on a Windows machine, and what optical character recognition can and cannot actually do, all four are explainable, and none of them are usually explained.

• How to check whether a website uploads your fileA five-minute method, using tools already in your browser, to see whether an online converter sends your file to a server. Works on any site.
• How PDF unlocking actually worksWhy removing a PDF restriction is instant and needs no password cracking, what the two kinds of PDF password really are, and where the line is.
• iPhone HEIC photos, explainedWhy iPhone photos are HEIC, why Windows and Android choke on them, the camera setting that stops it, and every honest option for converting what you already have.
• How to save images from a PDF without losing qualityWhy screenshots of a PDF come out blurry, every way to get the original images out (free and paid), and how to handle charts that are not images at all.
• How to get a table out of a screenshotTurn a screenshot or photo of a table into a spreadsheet, CSV or JSON: which tool to pick, how to capture it so columns survive, and what to check after.
• What OCR can and cannot doAn honest guide to OCR accuracy: what recognises well, what fails, why handwriting is out of reach, and how to read a confidence score before trusting a result.
• How to make a scanned PDF searchableA scan is a photograph of paper with no text in it. Here is how to add a text layer so it can be searched, what that costs, and how to do it without an upload.
• Scan a document to PDF in the browserPhotograph pages with your camera and get a PDF, without installing a scanner app or letting the photos reach a server. What it does well and what it does not.

Why these are written this way

Most explanations of file formats and converters are produced to rank, not to inform. They restate the question, pad to a word count, and stop just before the part you actually needed. The tell is that they never say when the answer is "you do not need this tool", because the page exists to sell the tool.

These are written the other way round. The unlocking guide explains that PDF permission flags were never a real lock, which is not a flattering thing to say about a tool that removes them. The OCR guide states plainly that handwriting does not work and no amount of image quality will change that. The HEIC guide spends more words on an iPhone setting and a Mac feature than on anything here, because for most people those are the better answer.

The test each one has to pass is simple: would this still have been worth reading if the tools did not exist? If not, it is a landing page wearing a guide's clothes, and it does not go up.

What is coming

More will follow as questions come up often enough to be worth answering properly: image formats and when each one is right, and why file sizes behave the way they do, are both on the list. If there is one you keep hitting, the contact page is the place to say so.