About

What FileFinery is

FileFinery turns files into PDFs and edits the PDFs you already have. It converts images (JPG, PNG, WebP) and documents (DOCX, TXT, Markdown, HTML) into PDF, and it merges, splits and reorders existing PDFs. There is also a print-shop finder for the point where a document has to leave the screen and become paper.

Everything is free, needs no account, applies no watermark, and runs entirely inside your browser tab. Nothing you convert is ever uploaded.

Why it exists

Look at what people actually convert to PDF. Signed contracts, medical forms, tax paperwork, lease agreements, résumés, photographs of a passport for a visa application, bank letters for a mortgage broker.

The standard way to do this is to upload the document to a website you know nothing about, where it joins a processing queue on somebody else's server, alongside strangers' equally sensitive paperwork, protected by a promise that it will be "deleted within an hour". That promise may be entirely sincere. It is also unverifiable from outside, and it is only as durable as the operator's current security posture, business model and ownership.

Browsers have not needed that arrangement for years. They can read images, parse documents and write PDFs without help. FileFinery exists to do the obvious version of this tool, the one where the contract never leaves your laptop, and to make it pleasant enough to use every day.

How it actually works

FileFinery is a static site: pre-built HTML, CSS and JavaScript served from a CDN. There is no application server, no database and no storage bucket. Files are read from your disk by the page itself, processed in memory on your machine, and handed back to your downloads as a local blob.

The heavy lifting is done by three open-source libraries running in the page rather than on a server:

• pdf-lib builds and edits PDF documents, laying images onto pages and reordering, extracting and merging pages of existing files.
• mammoth.js converts DOCX into clean semantic HTML, mapping Word's styles onto headings, lists and emphasis rather than trying to reproduce its layout model.
• marked renders Markdown to HTML for the text and Markdown routes.

Because all of this is client-side, the guarantees are structural. There is no bucket for your documents to leak from, because no bucket exists. Batch size is limited by your machine's memory and not by a free-tier quota: up to 100 files and 60 MB each. And the site works offline: load a page, disconnect, and every conversion still runs.

What it will not do

• Upload your files anywhere, under any circumstances.
• Ask for an email address or an account to use it.
• Watermark output, or hold better output behind a paywall.
• Cap you at two conversions and then ask for a subscription.
• Reproduce a complex Word layout pixel for pixel. Converting DOCX means converting its content (headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, images) into a clean PDF. A document with intricate columns, text boxes and floating positioning will be readable and correct but will not be a photocopy of what Word showed you. That is a real limitation and it is stated up front rather than discovered.

What it cannot convert

Being clear about the edges is part of being useful:

• Legacy .doc (the pre-2007 binary format). Only .docx is supported. Opening the file in Word or LibreOffice and saving as .docx is the fix.
• Spreadsheets and presentations (.xlsx, .pptx). Their layout models do not map onto a page the way a document's does.
• HEIC images, which only Safari can decode without shipping a large decoder to every visitor. Converting to JPG first works.
• Password-protected PDFs, which must be unlocked before editing.
• Scanned text recognition. A scanned page becomes an image in a PDF and no searchable text. That is OCR, and it is a different tool.

Who builds it

FileFinery is designed, written and maintained by a single independent developer working as Studio Ropewalk, LLC, a limited liability company registered in North Carolina, United States. Every page of writing on this site was written by hand by that person, from the work of building the conversion pipeline and testing what each route does to real documents.

There is no support desk to route through. Messages sent via the contact page are read by the person who wrote the code, usually within a few days.

How it is funded

FileFinery is free and intends to stay free. It is paid for by display advertising in fixed slots along the page margins. That is the entire business model: no premium tier, no data brokerage, no affiliate links dressed up as recommendations. Your documents cannot be part of the deal, because the site never receives them. What advertising partners set in your browser, and how to opt out, is in the privacy policy.

Where to start

Pick a route off the job board, or read the guides if you want to understand what a conversion will do before you run it: how PDF actually works, why a Word document does not survive as a picture of itself, and how to get a document printed properly.