About the site
ExamPDFView is free, has no accounts and carries no adverts. Everything below is the short version; the pages it links to are the long one.
Questions and answers
Is it free, and is there a catch?
It is free and there is no catch. There is no paid tier, no trial, no advertising and no affiliate link anywhere on the site. It is not currently funded at all, and if that changes the About page will say so before it happens.
Do I need an account?
No, and there is not one to create. Files are not stored, so there would be nothing for an account to hold.
What is the file size limit?
Fifty megabytes per job. That covers almost every exam paper and most scanned coursework. A larger scan usually shrinks under the limit with Scan to PDF or Compress PDF.
Why can I not search or copy text from my PDF?
Because it is a scan - a photograph of a page - and it contains no text at all, only pixels. This is the single most common PDF misunderstanding. Try to select a word: if you cannot, there is nothing there to select.
Do you do OCR?
No. Optical character recognition on printed text is a solved problem, but this site does not currently offer it, and on handwriting no system is reliable enough to trust with an exam script. We would rather not have the feature than have a bad one.
Can you convert a PDF to Word?
No. A faithful conversion has to reconstruct a document structure the PDF never recorded, and the results are consistently poor enough that rebuilding from extracted text is usually faster. PDF to Text gives you the words to work from.
Can you recover a forgotten PDF password?
No, and nor can anyone else. AES-256 encryption is not defeated by guessing. Sites offering password recovery are operating on files that were only permission-flagged, or they are lying.
Why did compressing barely shrink my file?
Because its weight was text and vector drawing rather than images. There was nothing image-shaped to remove. A tool claiming a large saving on such a file is rasterising your text, which makes it blurry and unsearchable.
Why does my printed graph give the wrong answer?
The print dialogue scaled the page. 'Fit to page' shrinks content by a few per cent, which changes every measured length. Set the scale to 100 per cent.
Can I use this on a phone?
Yes. Every tool and the reader work on a phone. Reading an A4 document on a phone screen is uncomfortable regardless of the software, which is a property of the format rather than of this site.
Do you host exam papers?
No. This site hosts no exam board material of any kind. Download papers from your board, and use the tools here on your own copies.
Something is wrong on a page here. Who do I tell?
The contact page. Corrections get made and dated.