About SlatePDF

SlatePDF is an independent project: a handful of PDF tools that do their work in your browser instead of on someone else's server.

Why it exists

Every spring, someone in my family asks how to "unlock" a bank statement or fix a typo on a form, and every spring I watch them upload a tax document to whatever website ranked first. Most of those sites are fine, but "fine" isn't what you want for a W-2. Modern browsers are fast enough to open, edit and encrypt PDFs locally, so I built tools that do exactly that.

How it works

• Display: pages are drawn with pdf.js, the same engine Firefox uses to show PDFs.
• Editing and encryption: new content, page changes and AES-256 encryption are written with pdf-lib, an open-source library that runs in the browser.
• Server: a small Node.js service handles accounts, the daily free-use counter, Pro subscriptions (Stripe, or a clearly labeled test mode before card billing launches), and the Pro merge/split/compress/convert jobs, which are processed in memory and never stored.
• No trackers: no advertising or analytics scripts are loaded. Traffic is measured from ordinary server logs.

About the author

Daniel Brooks is a product engineer in Austin, Texas, who has spent the last decade building document workflows for small businesses, schools and county offices. Daniel writes the code and the help text on every tool page, and answers support email personally.

Principles the project is held to:

1. Free tools stay genuinely useful — no watermarks, no forced sign-up.
2. Files are processed on your device whenever that's technically possible.
3. Help pages say plainly what a tool can't do.

Contact

Bug reports, feature requests and press: support@pdf.joverwk2026.org, or see the contact page.