Microsoft Edge to Add Free PDF Merging and Page Tools

Microsoft is preparing a significant update to the PDF reader built into Microsoft Edge. According to the company's public roadmap, the browser will soon let users merge and organize PDF files natively, with no third-party software, no online service and no paid Adobe Acrobat subscription.

Until now, every major browser could open PDFs and offer basic tools to fill in forms, sign or annotate them. Managing the documents themselves and the pages inside them, however, remained the job of dedicated applications.

What Edge's PDF reader will do

The new merge tool will let users combine an open document with other PDFs, whether they are open in other tabs or stored on the PC, into a single file. Users will also be able to select pages to extract or delete, change their order and rotate those displayed the wrong way.

Edge will also get a tool to extract content such as text and images. It will work on scanned documents too, thanks to the optical character recognition (OCR) module built into Windows 11. A new side panel will gather comments, handwritten notes and highlights in one place, where they can be searched, filtered and edited.

The reader will also translate PDF documents into up to 62 languages. Ironically, the feature relies on Adobe technology: Microsoft abandoned its historic PDF engine in 2023 in favor of the Adobe Acrobat PDF Engine.

Local and non-destructive

All of these operations will run entirely on the user's PC. Edits, merges and annotations will be executed locally, and no data will pass through the servers of Microsoft, Adobe or any other cloud service.

The operations are also non-destructive. The source PDF files will not be modified: the built-in PDF module will automatically generate a new file whenever a change is made.

For Windows 11 users who only occasionally need to combine or reorder documents, this could remove the need for a separate PDF application, and it keeps sensitive files off third-party online tools.