How to read a PDF in your browser
- Choose a file
Drag a PDF onto the reader, or select one from your device. Large files open just as fast because there is no upload step.
- Move around the document
Scroll continuously, click a thumbnail, or type a page number into the counter. The arrow keys move a page at a time and Home and End jump to the ends.
- Find what you need
Press the search icon and type. Every match is counted, and Enter steps through them in order. Search only works where the PDF has a text layer - a scan has none.
- Send it on to a tool
The panel underneath the reader shows what the file actually is, and links to the tools that act on it, so you do not have to guess which one applies.
Why this matters for exam and study documents
A past paper and its mark scheme usually arrive as two separate downloads with unhelpful names like 9709_s23_qp_12.pdf. Opening both here, side by side in two tabs, is faster than any desktop reader because there is no import step and no account.
What is kept, what changes, and what this will not do
These change how a document presents itself rather than what it contains - with one important exception, which is that cropping hides content without removing it.
Kept
- The exact page layout the author intended, including fonts and diagrams
- Internal links, the document outline and form fields
- Your privacy - the file never leaves the browser
Changed
- Nothing. The reader displays the file and never writes to it.
Limits
- Search needs a text layer; a photographed or scanned page has none.
- Very large documents over a few hundred pages take a moment to build their thumbnail strip.
Questions and answers
Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
No. The reader runs entirely in your browser. The file is read from your own disk into your own memory and is never transmitted anywhere. You can confirm this by opening the reader, disconnecting from the network, and opening a document - it still works.
Why can I not search a scanned paper?
Searching finds characters in the file's text layer. A scan is a photograph of a page: to a computer it is a picture, with no letters in it at all. Reading it as text requires optical character recognition, which is a different job from displaying the page.
Can I annotate or highlight here?
Not in the reader. Highlighting a PDF in a browser tab is a poor place to keep revision notes, because they live in the file rather than in your notes. Extract the text instead and keep the notes where you actually revise from.