7 PdfPeaks Tools You're Probably Not Using Yet
Most people find PdfPeaks through merge or compress, use it once, and never scroll past those two tools again. Fair enough, that covers 80% of what most people need. But there's a second layer of tools sitting in the "AI & Advanced" and "Edit, OCR & Security" menus that solve problems people usually don't realize have a one-click fix. Here are seven of them, what they're actually for, and where they fall short.
1. AI Summarizer — for when you don't have time to read the whole thing
AI Summarizer takes a PDF and gives you back a condensed version: the main points, without the 40 pages around them. Upload the file, wait a few seconds, and you get a plain-text summary you can copy out or download.
Where it's actually useful: a research paper you need the gist of before deciding whether to read it properly, a long contract before a call where someone's going to ask "so what does it actually say," a report someone sent you at 6pm that you need the highlights of before a 9am meeting.
Where it's not: anything where the exact wording matters. A summary is an aid to reading, not a replacement for it, especially for legal or medical documents where one clause changes the meaning of the whole page. Treat it as a first pass, not a final answer.
2. Compare PDF — find what actually changed between two versions
Compare PDF takes two versions of a document and highlights the differences between them, text added, text removed, changed. Upload the original and the revised file, and it flags what moved.
This is the tool for contract redlines when the other party sends back "final_v3_actually_final.pdf" with no track changes, comparing two drafts of a CV, or catching what a vendor quietly changed in an updated quote. Reading two 15-page documents side by side looking for a changed number is slow and error-prone. Comparison tools exist because humans are bad at that specific task, not because they're bad at reading.
It works best on documents that are structurally similar (same layout, same page count, revised text rather than a totally rebuilt file). Heavily reformatted documents will show more noise in the diff.
3. HTML to PDF — save a webpage the way it actually looked
HTML to PDF takes a URL or raw HTML and converts it into a PDF, preserving layout rather than just dumping the text.
Useful for archiving a webpage before it changes or disappears (pricing pages, terms of service, a job listing you want a record of), saving an online receipt or booking confirmation that doesn't offer a PDF download, or turning a long online article into something you can read offline or print cleanly. Browser "print to PDF" does something similar but often mangles layout on complex pages; a dedicated converter tends to handle CSS and page breaks better.
4. Repair PDF — for the file that suddenly won't open
Repair PDF attempts to fix a PDF that's throwing an error when you try to open it: corrupted after a bad download, damaged by an interrupted transfer, or generated by a buggy tool in the first place.
Upload the broken file, and the tool tries to rebuild a working version from whatever's salvageable in the structure. It can't perform miracles. If the file was truncated mid-download and half the data genuinely isn't there, no repair tool recovers content that doesn't exist in the file. What it's good at is fixing structural corruption where the content is intact but the file's internal formatting broke, which is a more common failure mode than people expect.
5. Redact / Mask PDF — cover sensitive information before you share
Mask PDF draws solid boxes over parts of a document you don't want visible: an account number on a bank statement, a salary figure on a contract you're sharing as a template, a signature on a form you're using as an example.
One thing worth being explicit about: this draws a visual box over the content in the output. Before sharing a redacted file outside your organization, it's worth double-checking the exported PDF doesn't still have the underlying text selectable underneath the box (copy-paste the redacted area and see what comes out). This is a known failure mode with redaction tools in general, not specific to any one tool, and it's worth the ten seconds it takes to check.
6. Crop PDF — remove margins and dead space
Crop PDF trims the visible page area: cutting off wide margins, removing a scanned page's dark edges, or focusing a page down to just the content someone needs to see.
Common case: a scanned document has 2 inches of dark border around the actual page because of how it sat on the scanner bed. Cropping fixes that without re-scanning. Also useful for pulling just the top half of a page (a letterhead and address block, for example) out as its own file.
7. Add Page Numbers — for documents that are about to get printed
Add Page Numbers does exactly what it says, stamping sequential numbers onto every page, with control over position and starting number.
It sounds minor until you're compiling a 60-page report from five different source documents and someone asks for "page 34" in a meeting. Numbering isn't glamorous, but it's the difference between a document people can navigate together and one where everyone's just saying "scroll down a bit more."
Quick reference
ToolBest forNot great forAI SummarizerFast overview of a long documentAnything where exact wording is legally or medically load-bearingCompare PDFSpotting changes between two versionsDocuments with completely different layoutsHTML to PDFArchiving a webpage's actual layoutPages requiring login to viewRepair PDFStructural corruption in an otherwise intact fileFiles with genuinely missing/truncated dataMask PDFVisually covering sensitive info before sharingAssuming the underlying text is gone without checkingCrop PDFTrimming margins and scan bordersReflowing or resizing text itselfAdd Page NumbersDocuments about to be printed or shared for reference—FAQ
Do any of these require an account? No. Every tool on this list works without signing up, the same as merge and compress.
Are these tools free? Yes, all of them, with no watermark on the output.
Is my file kept after processing? No. Files are transferred over HTTPS and removed after the job finishes.
Which of these should I try first? If you regularly deal with contracts or revised documents, start with Compare PDF, it saves the most time relative to how little most people know it exists. If you're clearing out old scans, Repair and Crop are the quiet workhorses.
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