Free, beta, runs in your browser

Deste Edit your PDFs in the browser.
They never leave your device.

Deste merges PDFs and images, removes, rotates and reorders pages, and compresses scanned documents. It opens like a website but works like an app: everything happens inside your browser, on your own processor. No document is uploaded to a server; no install, no account, no ads.

In the browser No install No account Documents stay on device Works on phones Free · beta
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Deste’s Stacks view: cards for an annual report, a deck, a catalog, an invoice, a lease and meeting notes; below, the selected documents and pages with the Save PDF button. Deste’s Stacks view: cards for an annual report, a deck, a catalog, an invoice, a lease and meeting notes; below, the selected documents and pages with the Save PDF button.
Stacks Each document is a card: select it, drag to reorder, rotate, compress, remove. The documents in these screenshots are made up.

What it does

Merge, trim, reorder, compress

Putting a few PDFs into one file, fitting a scan into an email or pulling two pages out of a contract shouldn’t need an install, an account or handing your documents to someone else’s server.

01
Open PDFs and images
PDF, PNG, JPG, WebP, BMP, GIF and AVIF. Images become PDF pages; add several files at once or drag them onto the window.
02
Merge
The selected documents become a single PDF in the order on screen; untick the ones you don’t want.
03
Remove, rotate
Untick a page you don’t want; rotate one page or a whole document by 90°.
04
Reorder
Drag documents and pages into place. On a phone, hold a page for a moment to start dragging.
05
Move between documents
Drag a page onto another document to move or copy it. Split a document in two at any page.
06
Compress
Five levels. Scanned text documents often shrink to under a tenth of their size and stay searchable.
07
Pick up where you left off
Close the tab and come back: open documents, their order, selection and edits are still there.

Views

Document by document, or page by page

The same documents, three ways: Stacks shows them as cards, All Pages shows every page, History shows what you opened in recent days. A change made in one shows up in the others.

All Pages

Every page of every document in one grid

Untick a page and it drops out of the output, shown faded; one click brings it back. All and None in the header select every page of a document, Rotate turns them all. Drop a page on another document’s row and Deste asks whether to move or copy it; a moved page carries a badge.

Deste’s All Pages view: five pages of an annual report and six slides of a deck in a grid; the report’s third page is removed from the output. Deste’s All Pages view: five pages of an annual report and six slides of a deck in a grid; the report’s third page is removed from the output.

Preview

See pages large, fix them there

Click a page and the document opens large: a thumbnail rail on the left, rotate, remove, zoom and full screen on top. Split cuts the document in two at that page. Only the page on screen and its neighbours are drawn, so a hundred-page document opens without waiting.

Deste’s preview: a page rail on the left and the orange cover slide of a deck shown large. Deste’s preview: a page rail on the left and the orange cover slide of a deck shown large.

Compression

Compression made for scans

A page from a scanner or a phone camera is a photograph of hundreds of kilobytes. Deste separates the text from the paper, keeping the text in a crisp two-tone layer and photos in a layer of their own. In the example below, the first page of a scanned letter goes from 952 KB to 14 KB. Before saving you see every page before and after, with its size.

Deste’s compression window: the five-level slider at Medium; on the left the original page of a scanned letter at 952 KB, on the right the compressed page at 14 KB. Deste’s compression window: the five-level slider at Medium; on the left the original page of a scanned letter at 952 KB, on the right the compressed page at 14 KB.

Five levels

High quality
Leaves the source almost untouched; the file shrinks little.
Light
Images re-encoded at 150 dpi, text left alone.
Medium
Text becomes crisp two-tone, photos keep their own texture. Default.
Strong
Photos compressed too; text stays sharp and searchable.
Extreme
Every setting at its limit for tough scans; stamps and signatures are kept.

The level can change page by page, and a page can be skipped. Under Advanced you’ll find grayscale, fine-text protection and removing the invisible text layer. The result is always saved as a new file; your original is not touched. The gain depends on the document: a PDF already full of compressed photos shrinks little.

Privacy

Your documents never leave your device

A website is assumed to upload the file you give it. Deste doesn’t — and it says so the first time you open it.

Deste’s welcome card: Your documents never leave your device; nothing leaves your device, no internet used, kept in your browser for 7 days. Deste’s welcome card: Your documents never leave your device; nothing leaves your device, no internet used, kept in your browser for 7 days.

How

What your browser downloads when you open the site is the app itself: the interface, the PDF engine and the compression engine, written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly. Opening a document, drawing pages, merging and compressing all run in that code, on your processor. Not a single request goes out for your document; once the app has loaded, working on documents uses no internet.

What is kept

So that you can reopen them from History and pick up where you left off after closing the tab, opened documents are kept on this device only, in the storage the browser gives this site, and deleted automatically when the time is up (7 days by default). In Settings you can choose 1 or 30 days, or turn history off; then nothing is kept and documents go when the tab closes.

What the server sees

The app’s files are served through Cloudflare. To deliver the page, Cloudflare processes your IP address and browser details and logs which app file was requested and when. Your documents are not in those requests, because they are never sent. There is no analytics, tracking or ad code. Details (Turkish): terms of use.

On your phone

The same tool, in your pocket

It opens in the phone’s browser, nothing to install. Lists scroll with your finger; hold a page or a document for half a second, then drag it into place. Add Files opens the phone’s file picker.

Deste on a phone: the Stacks view with two columns of document cards. Deste on a phone: the Stacks view with two columns of document cards. Deste on a phone: the All Pages view with the annual report’s pages. Deste on a phone: the All Pages view with the annual report’s pages.

Desktop · coming

The desktop app: a printer that shows you first

A desktop version of Deste is being built for Windows and Linux; it can’t be downloaded yet. It does everything the web version does, and adds itself to the system as a printer.

What’s different

It captures from any app. Choose Print → Deste in Word, a browser or any other program and the job lands in Deste’s stack instead of on paper. Collect output from different programs there, trim it, print it in one go.

It prints to your real printer. Copies, duplex, three levels of toner saving and black-and-white. Without filters pages go out as vectors, so text stays sharp. On Windows it uses the system’s printing stack, on Linux CUPS.

It waits in the tray. It can start quietly at login; captured documents and history stay on disk, on your machine only.

Details: Capturing print jobs · Print options.

Limits

Good to know

Beta

This is a beta. Try important documents on copies and check the PDF you get. Whether form fields and digital signatures are preserved has not been verified yet; password-protected PDFs can’t be opened for now.

Browser. Needs WebAssembly and WebGL. It runs in Chromium-based browsers such as Chrome and Edge, on desktop and Android; Firefox and Safari (iPhone, iPad) haven’t been tested enough yet.

Size. 250 MB per file, 400 MB in total for documents open at once. The limit keeps clear of the browser’s memory ceiling.

Use. Free for personal, non-commercial use. For commercial use and feedback: info@destepdf.com.

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