Preparing your file

Most PDFs work first time and need nothing on this page. It’s here for the ones that don’t — and for the one thing that quietly decides whether your document is searchable at all.

The basics

Format	PDF on every plan. On a paid plan, also EPUB, Word (.docx, .doc) and PowerPoint (.pptx, .ppt)
File size	Up to 50 MB
Pages	No limit
Page size	Any — the reader adapts to the page, portrait or landscape, A4 or a square lookbook

Mixed page sizes in one document are fine. So are spreads: use the Layout setting on the document to control whether pages show one at a time or side by side.

Which format should you upload?

PDF is the one to reach for. It’s fixed-layout, so what you exported is exactly what a reader sees — every position, font and image where you put it.

EPUB (paid plans) is reflowable, which means it carries no pages at all, only text. We flow it into a page size we choose (A5, 11pt), so the result is a faithful reading of the book rather than a reproduction of a designed layout — and page 40 here won’t be page 40 in someone’s e-reader. For a novel or a report that’s fine. For anything where the layout is the point, export a PDF.

Word and PowerPoint (paid plans) are converted for you. We use LibreOffice, which reads both formats well, but it is not Word or PowerPoint — so treat the result as very good rather than identical:

• A PowerPoint deck converts cleanly: one slide becomes one page, at the slide’s own size. The one thing to know is that a slide built up over several clicks becomes a single page with everything visible at once. That is what a static export of that slide is — PowerPoint’s own Export to PDF does the same.
• A Word document has no fixed pages: Word decides where the text breaks, and our converter decides again. Long documents can land a page or two out from what you saw. If exact pagination matters, export the PDF yourself.

Either way we keep your original, so if a conversion isn’t right you can replace it without re-uploading from scratch.

Free is the PDF plan. If you’re on Free, export a PDF first — every version of Word and PowerPoint has File → Export as PDF, and you’ll get a result you have already checked rather than one a converter decided for you. It costs nothing and it is what we’d recommend on a paid plan too whenever the layout really matters.

Trying it without an account?

The homepage trial is deliberately smaller — 10 MB and the first 10 pages — and the link lasts 24 hours. Upload from an account to get the whole document, permanently.

The part that matters most: is there real text in your PDF?

This is worth understanding, because it decides more than it looks like it does.

A PDF can hold its words two ways. Most are exported from software — InDesign, Word, Canva, Google Docs — and carry a text layer: the actual characters, which we can read directly. Others are scans or flattened exports, where every page is just a picture of words. There is nothing to read in those, only pixels.

The difference decides whether your document has:

• a transcript readers can open
• search inside the document
• text a screen reader can read aloud
• text that search engines can index

When a page has no text layer, we run OCR to recover it — reading the words off the image. That’s on every paid plan, up to 150 pages per document. On the Free plan there’s no OCR, so an image-only PDF stays image-only: it looks perfect and flips normally, but it has no transcript, no search, and nothing for a screen reader.

How to tell before you upload. Open the PDF in Preview or Acrobat and try to select a sentence with your cursor. If the text highlights, you have a text layer. If you can only draw a box over it, it’s an image.

How to fix it. Re-export from the original file rather than scanning or flattening, and don’t tick “convert text to outlines” — that turns letters into shapes and throws the words away. Outlining text is a print habit that costs you every one of the things above.

Getting a clean conversion

A few export choices make the difference between a document that converts perfectly and one that doesn’t:

• Embed your fonts. Most export presets do this. Without it, text can shift or fall back to a different typeface when we render the pages.
• Embed your images rather than linking them. A linked image that lives on your machine isn’t in the file, so it can’t be rendered.
• Keep links as real links. If your PDF has hyperlinks, export it as an interactive PDF — in InDesign that’s Export → Adobe PDF (Interactive), or tick “Include hyperlinks” in the print preset. We turn real link annotations into clickable areas in the reader; a URL that is only typed on the page is just text. (We do detect email addresses and obvious web addresses in the text as a fallback, but a proper link is always better.)
• Remove passwords and restrictions. See below — this is the most common cause of an outright failure.
• Use plain characters in the filename. Letters, numbers, spaces and dashes. Symbols like % and # mean something in a URL and can trip up the upload.

When an upload fails

We tell you which of these it was on the document itself. Here’s what each one means.

“This PDF is password protected”

The file needs a password to open, so we can’t read it. This is the commonest failure, and re-uploading the same file will never fix it.

Open it in Acrobat or Preview, save a copy without the password, and upload that. In Acrobat: File → Properties → Security → Security Method: No Security.

“This PDF doesn’t allow copying or extracting its content”

The file opens, but its permissions forbid extracting content — often set by a print workflow or a document management system without anyone meaning to. We need that permission to turn pages into images.

Same fix: remove the restriction in Acrobat’s security settings and re-export.

“We couldn’t read this file — it may be damaged”

The file is corrupt, truncated, or isn’t really a PDF despite its name. This often happens to files that have been emailed, synced, or downloaded on a bad connection.

Open it in Acrobat or Preview first. If it won’t open cleanly there, it won’t here. Re-export from the original, or re-download it.

“This PDF has no pages”

The file is valid but empty. Usually an export that failed silently.

“That file is too large”

Over 50 MB. Re-export at a lower image quality — in Acrobat, File → Save as Other → Reduced Size PDF, or in InDesign choose a smaller preset than Press Quality. Print presets embed images at far higher resolution than a screen needs, and it’s normal for a document to shrink by 80% with no visible difference on screen.

Something else

If a document fails and none of the above fits, re-exporting with a different tool very often works — a PDF written by an unusual generator can be technically valid and still unusual enough to trip us up. If it keeps failing, get in touch with the file and we’ll look at it directly.