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Guides for the jobs these tools do, written and checked against the live tool by the person who builds them.
23 guides · 7 tasks · updated 10 October 2026
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MCP from First Principles: What It Is, Why It Exists, and How I Built a Wikipedia Research Assistant
MCP is a standard protocol connecting AI applications to tools, data and context. I built a small Wikipedia research assistant to find out what it does underneath the abstractions, and this is everything I learned while building it.
Agentic AI · 30 min read
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How to password protect a PDF properly
Open Protect PDF, type the password twice, and download the encrypted copy. It uses AES-256, which current Acrobat, Preview, and major browser viewers support. Its practical strength depends on the password you choose.
Why this one
Encryption is easy to add and easy to misunderstand, and the misunderstanding is the expensive part.
Main guide · protect-pdf · 5 min read
Recently added
- Can I make my PDF smaller without losing quality?Mostly yes for a text-based PDF and mostly no for a scan, because a scan's size is its page images and shrinking those images is the compression.10 Oct 2026
- What does password protecting a PDF actually do?A PDF can hold two different protections.4 Oct 2026
- My PDF is too big to email, what do I do?Start with Compress PDF: a scanned document usually gets much smaller, while a text-only PDF barely moves.24 Sept 2026
- Is it safe to remove a PDF password online?It depends on the document, not on the tool's promises.18 Sept 2026
- How do I compress a PDF to 500KB?Open Compress PDF, choose Smaller file, download the result, and check its size against 500 KB.14 Sept 2026
- Should I send this as a PDF or a Word file?Send a PDF when the document has to look the same for everyone, and work in Word while it still has to be rewritten.13 Sept 2026
- How do I remove the password from a PDF?Open Unlock PDF, add the file, type the password you already know, and download the unlocked copy.4 Sept 2026
- How do I get the text out of a scanned PDF?Run the file through OCR a PDF first.1 Sept 2026
- How do I convert a PDF to Word without losing the formatting?Open PDF to Word, upload one PDF, and download the .docx.29 Aug 2026
- How do I make a scanned PDF searchable?Upload the scan to OCR PDF, choose the language the document is written in, run the job, and download searchable.pdf.17 Aug 2026
- Why can't I search or copy the text in my scanned PDF?Because the pages are images, not text.11 Aug 2026
- What is the difference between splitting and extracting PDF pages?Extracting pulls selected pages out into one new PDF.5 Aug 2026
PDF /7
Merge, split, convert, compress. The whole paperwork drawer.
- Merge PDFsHow do I combine several PDFs into one file?4 guides4 guides
- Split and extract PDF pagesHow do I split a PDF into separate pages?3 guides3 guides
- Compress PDFsHow do I get my PDF under a 1 MB upload limit?6 guides6 guides
- Edit text and fill PDFsHow do I change text that is already in a PDF?1 guide1 guide
- Make scanned PDFs searchableHow do I make a scanned PDF searchable?3 guides3 guides
- Convert PDFs to WordHow do I convert a PDF to Word without losing the formatting?2 guides2 guides
- Password protect and unlock PDFsHow do I put a password on a PDF?4 guides4 guides