Blog
Practical, no-hype writing about how the PDF format actually works — and where it can bite you. I take apart PDF internals (what really happens when a file is converted to Word, how far the format can be pushed) and, above all, PDF security: how malicious PDF files are built, how encrypted documents are attacked, what metadata quietly leaks from your files, and how much digital signatures are really worth. Everything here follows the same principle as the app itself: your files stay on your computer. No affiliate links, no cloud upsell — just what I learn while building an offline PDF toolkit.
Most people have never installed Ghostscript and have no idea they use it. Yet it sits underneath an enormous number of servers: …
A three-page document has no business being 40 MB. Here's what makes PDFs enormous, what compression actually throws away, and how to shrink a file without ruining it.
Combining and splitting PDFs looks like the most harmless thing you can do to a document. There are two failure modes worth knowing about, and both involve sending someone more than you meant to.
Converting a PDF to Word is guesswork by design — the format throws away the information Word needs. Here's why layouts break, when conversion will simply fail, and how to get the best result.