What this is
ExamPDFView is a browser-based PDF reader with a set of tools around it. The reader opens a document in your own browser without uploading it anywhere. The tools - twenty-six of them - merge, split, compress, convert, redact and repair PDFs, and each one does the job it is named after or does not exist.
The site is built around a specific kind of document: exam papers, mark schemes, lecture notes, handwritten answers and everything else that arrives as a PDF during a course. That focus shapes the defaults, the guides and the examples throughout.
Who runs it
Four people, listed on the editorial policy page with their names, their backgrounds and what each one is responsible for. Between us we have worked in commercial print pre-press, document tooling, university learning support and the unglamorous business of making PDF libraries behave.
We are a small independent project, not a company with a marketing department. Nobody here is a persona, and no article on this site carries an invented byline.
The site in numbers
- Tools
- 26, every one of which works
- Guides
- Eight topic hubs and their spoke articles
- Accounts
- None. There is nothing to sign up for
- Adverts
- None
- Trackers
- None
- File retention
- Thirty minutes maximum, usually seconds
How it is funded
It is not, currently. There are no adverts, no affiliate links, no sponsored guides and no paid tier. Nothing on this site is placed because someone paid for it to be there.
If that changes, this paragraph changes with it, prominently and before the fact. A site that quietly acquires advertising and does not update its About page has told you something about how much the rest of it can be trusted.
Why there is no sign-up
Because there is nothing an account would do. Files are not stored, so there is no library to return to. Preferences are not complex enough to need syncing. An account would exist to collect an email address, which is a reason to have one and not a reason for you to want one.
What this site deliberately does not do
There is no optical character recognition, because reading handwriting reliably is beyond current systems and a plausible guess attached to an exam script is worse than nothing. There is no PDF-to-Word conversion, because a faithful one has to reconstruct structure the PDF never stored and the results are consistently poor. There is no password cracking, and there never will be.
There are also no pages for tools that do not exist. A great many PDF sites publish a page for every operation anyone has ever searched for and then fail to perform most of them. We would rather have twenty-six pages that work than sixty that do not.
Not affiliated with any exam board
This is an independent site. It is not connected to, endorsed by or acting for any examination board, awarding body, school, university or publisher. Exam board material remains the property of the board that published it, and nothing here hosts or redistributes it.
Where the material comes from
Every guide on this site was written by one of the four people named on the editorial policy page, tested against real files using the tools on this site, and dated. Where a guide states a number - a file size, a percentage saving, a resolution - that number came from a measurement rather than an estimate.
Where something is uncertain, the guide says so. There is a great deal of confidently wrong PDF advice on the internet and we have tried hard not to add to it.
Questions and answers
Is this site free?
Yes, entirely. No account, no trial, no paid tier, no adverts.
Do you keep my files?
No. Uploads and results are deleted within thirty minutes, usually within seconds of the download. The reader does not upload anything at all - it runs in your browser.
Can I use this for work documents?
For ordinary documents, yes. For anything confidential, use software on your own machine: any online tool has to receive a file in order to transform it, and that is true here as everywhere.
Who do I contact about a mistake?
The contact page. Corrections are made and dated, and we would rather hear about an error than have it sit there.