Organize PDF lays every page of your document out as a thumbnail you can rearrange. Drag a page to move it, turn the ones that came out of the scanner sideways, delete the blank separator sheets, and save a new PDF in exactly the order you see. Every tile also has move, rotate and delete buttons, so nothing here depends on being able to drag. The whole thing runs in your browser: pages are copied rather than re-rendered, so text stays selectable and image quality is untouched, and the document is never uploaded anywhere.
How to organize a PDF
- 1 Add your PDF — every page appears on the board as a preview.
- 2 Drag a page to a new position, or use the arrow buttons on the tile.
- 3 Rotate pages that are sideways and delete the ones you do not want.
- 4 Click Save PDF to download the reorganised document. Reset restores the original order and brings deleted pages back.
How the board works
When you add a file, pdf.js opens it and draws each page onto a small canvas. Those thumbnails exist purely so you can see what you are moving — they have no bearing on the output. All the tiles are created first and then filled in one by one, because a grid that grows a tile at a time reflows on every page and feels far slower than it is; the progress bar tracks that filling.
Reordering never touches the document. The board keeps an array of tiles, each remembering which page of the SOURCE file it came from, and moving a tile just moves an entry in that array — the rendered canvas is carried along rather than redrawn. Deleting detaches a tile without destroying it, which is precisely what makes Reset able to bring it back instantly.
When you save, pdf-lib creates a new empty document and copies the source pages across in the board's order, applying each tile's rotation as a quarter-turn offset on top of whatever the page already declared. Copying carries the content stream with its fonts, images and colour spaces, so the result is a real PDF, not a picture of one. The finished bytes are handed to the browser through a temporary blob URL that is revoked immediately afterwards.
What people fix
A scan that came out backwards
Feeder scanners routinely produce pages in reverse order. Dragging the last page to the front a few times, or reversing the whole stack tile by tile, is faster than rescanning.
Sideways pages
One sheet fed in rotated and now the whole document is awkward to read. Two clicks on the rotate button fixes it, and because rotation is a page property, nothing is re-encoded.
Removing blank separator sheets
Batch scans are full of blank pages and cover sheets. Deleting them on the board takes seconds and drops the file size along with them.
Putting an appendix back at the end
A merged report often ends up with sections in the wrong order. Moving a block of pages to the end is a drag rather than a rebuild.
Why organize a PDF in the browser
Documents almost never arrive in the order they should be in. A scanner reverses a stack, one sheet goes through upside down, a merged report has the appendix in the middle and blank separator pages between every section. Fixing that is a five-minute job with a visual board and a genuinely annoying one without. Doing it locally means the contract, the medical file or the signed application you are tidying up never leaves your device, and the result carries no watermark.
What it cannot do
The browser sets the boundaries here:
- Password-protected PDFs are refused. pdf.js cannot draw pages it cannot decrypt, and pdf-lib cannot rebuild them. Remove the password in your PDF reader first.
- Very long documents are slow to preview. Every page has to be rendered to a thumbnail before the board is complete, so a 500-page file takes a while and holds a lot of canvases at once.
- It works on one document at a time. To interleave pages from two files, use Merge PDF, which puts every page of every file on a single board.
- Interactive form fields and digital signatures do not survive the rebuild. Pages keep their appearance but not the form structure, and a cryptographic signature is invalidated because the document it signed no longer exists.
- Bookmarks, the table of contents and document metadata are not carried over. The output is a clean document with KitYards as its producer.
Troubleshooting
- A page shows as a blank tile
- The preview failed for that page but the page itself is usually fine — it will still be copied correctly when you save. Pages that use unusual fonts or very large embedded images are the common cause.
- Dragging does not work on my phone
- Touch dragging inside a scrolling page is unreliable by design — the browser cannot tell a drag from a scroll. Use the arrow buttons on each tile instead; they do exactly the same thing.
- I deleted the wrong page
- Press Reset. It restores the original order and brings back every deleted page. Nothing is lost until you leave the page, and your source file is never modified at all.
Frequently asked questions
Can I reorder without dragging?
Yes. Every tile has arrow buttons that move the page one position earlier or later, and they keep keyboard focus as the page moves, so you can press one repeatedly to walk a page across the document. Dragging is the shortcut, not the requirement.
Does deleting a page lose it permanently?
No. Delete only removes the page from the board; the source file is untouched and Reset brings every deleted page back in its original position. Nothing is committed until you press Save PDF, and even then the original file on your disk is not modified.
Is the document uploaded?
No. The previews are drawn by pdf.js and the new document is assembled by pdf-lib, both running in your browser. Check the Network tab of your developer tools while you work, or disconnect from the internet after the page loads — everything still functions.
Does rotating re-render the page?
No. Rotation is written as a property of the page, the same way your PDF reader stores it, so the content is not touched at all. Text stays text and the file does not grow.
Can I duplicate a page?
Not from the board. If you need a page twice, extract it with Split PDF and then use Merge PDF to place both copies where you want them.