Most of the time spent on a drawing set is not spent reviewing it.
It is spent merging four PDFs a consultant sent separately. Pulling one detail out of a general arrangement so it can go in an e-mail. Checking that sheet 12 of 40 is actually there before the set goes out. Rotating the three pages that came in sideways. None of it is difficult, and none of it is the job.
The usual answer is to search for “merge pdf”, pick whichever site is at the top, and upload the file. It works. But it means a drawing set that is not released yet, or a client’s tender document, or a revision under commercial discussion, has been sent to a company you have never heard of, with terms you did not read, for a job that takes four seconds.
We have published 45 free tools that do those jobs without that step.
Nothing is uploaded
This is the part that matters, so it is worth being precise about what it means.
When you drop a file on one of these tools, it is not sent anywhere. The browser reads it from your disk, the work happens in the tab you have open, and the result is written back out by the browser. There is no server involved, because there is nothing for a server to do. We never receive the file, which means we cannot store it, cannot lose it, and cannot be asked to hand it over.
You do not have to take our word for it. Open your browser’s network tab, run a tool, and watch. Nothing leaves.
We also self-host the three typefaces the tool pages use, rather than loading them from Google Fonts like most sites do. It is a small thing, but it means a tool page makes no request to anyone but us — and a check in our build refuses to release if that ever stops being true.
There is no account, no sign-up, no e-mail address and no usage limit. We are not collecting anything, so there is nothing to sign up for.
What they do
Seven groups, and the hub at /tools/ lists all of them.
Page operations are the obvious ones: merge, split, extract, delete, rotate, compress. Then the things you need occasionally and cannot remember where to find: add page numbers, add a header or footer, watermark a draft, add bookmarks to a long set, flatten markups into the page so they stop being editable.
Conversions go both ways between PDF and JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF and plain text.
Drawing and measurement is where these stop being generic. You can measure on a PDF after calibrating from one dimension you know. You can crop a detail out at the drawing’s own scale, as vector PDF rather than a screenshot. You can overlay two revisions, lined up automatically, to see what moved. There is a print scale calculator for when a set has been plotted to the wrong ratio, a scale bar generator, a coordinate grid overlay, and an A0–A6 sheet size reference.
Checks before issue are the ones we wanted most ourselves. Find pages that are the wrong size or rotation for the rest of the set. Paste your sheet numbers and find the gaps and duplicates. Find blank pages. Check whether the fonts are embedded, which is the usual reason a drawing prints wrong on somebody else’s machine. Check image resolution in effective DPI, so you know whether a scanned detail will survive printing.
Generators produce a file: a drawing register built from the set itself, a comment register, a sheet index, a transmittal, an RFI log, a snag list, title block templates, and PDF markups exported to Excel.
Each tool has its own page, with what it does, how to use it, and — this matters more than the feature list — what it cannot do. Every page has a Limitations section, because a tool that quietly does the wrong thing on an edge case is worse than one that refuses.
Why we made them free
The honest answer has two halves.
The first is that we needed several of them. Xenmark is a drawing review tool, and the work either side of a review kept sending us to sites we did not want to send drawings to. Having built them for ourselves, there is no cost to us in leaving them open — they run on your computer, not ours, so a thousand people using them costs exactly what nobody using them costs.
The second is that we would like you to know who we are. If one of these saves you ten minutes before a set goes out, and you later need somewhere to actually run the review — numbered comments on the drawing, replies attached to them, a revision history, an Excel register at the end — you will know where to look. That is the whole pitch. There is no upsell in the tools, no locked feature, no “sign in to download”.
They are not Xenmark
Worth saying plainly, because the line matters.
These tools are single-purpose and they forget everything the moment you close the tab. That is the right design for cropping a detail, and the wrong design for a review, where the point is that several people work on the same drawing over weeks and the record survives.
A review needs somewhere shared to live: comments numbered so people can refer to them in a meeting, replies attached to the comment rather than scattered across e-mail, a status on each one, revisions in order, and a deliverable at the end that the other party can open. That is what Xenmark does, and it needs a project and an account because it is keeping something for you.
The tools are for the jobs around it. Use them without ever creating an account, and we will be glad they were useful.