About CarenCart

What this site is

Most document jobs are small and occasional. You need to merge four PDFs before emailing them, drop the file size of a scan, pull the text out of a Word document, or check what metadata a photo is carrying before you publish it. Installing software for a two-minute job is out of proportion, and the alternative — uploading a document to an unknown server — is a decision people make without much information.

CarenCart exists to make those jobs quick without making that trade quietly. Every tool page states plainly where the work happens before you choose a file, and the site is built so that the claim is verifiable rather than promotional.

How the tools work

There are two engines behind these pages, and the difference matters more than it might sound.

Tools that run in your browser

Pages marked Runs in your browser read your file directly from disk into your browser's memory, do the work in JavaScript, and hand the result back as a download. There is no upload step to opt out of, because there is no upload. If you disconnect from the network after the page has loaded, these tools still work. Closing the tab discards everything.

PDF page manipulation — merging, splitting, rotating, and removing a password you already know — deliberately stayed in the browser for this reason. It is faster without a round trip, and it means the privacy claim on those pages is literally true rather than a promise about server conduct.

Tools that run on the server

Some formats need work a browser cannot do well: reading the zipped XML inside a Word document, writing a genuine Excel workbook, re-encoding an image to strip its embedded metadata. Pages marked Processed and deleted send your file over HTTPS to a temporary folder, process it, and delete it as soon as the result is written. The result waits behind a single-use link that stops working after one download or after 15 minutes, whichever comes first.

Where both approaches are possible you get both: the browser version runs by default, and the same page falls back to a plain HTML form if JavaScript is unavailable. That fallback is also why much of the site works with JavaScript switched off entirely.

What we do not do

• No accounts. There is no sign-up, no login and no user database. Nothing you do here is attached to an identity.
• No file retention. Server-side uploads are deleted as soon as the job finishes. Results are single-use. Nothing is archived, indexed or inspected.
• No password recovery. Unlock PDF removes encryption from a document after you supply the correct password. There is no guessing or brute-force mode anywhere in this site, and there will not be one. If you have lost the password to a file you own, the answer is the person or system that created it.
• No watermarks and no artificial limits designed to sell you an upgrade.

Honesty about limits

Format conversion is lossy more often than conversion tools admit. A PDF does not store paragraphs, headings or tables — it stores positioned glyphs — so rebuilding an editable document from one is reconstruction, not extraction. Where a tool cannot carry a feature across, the page says so before you start rather than after you have downloaded something disappointing, and several tools report what they had to infer so you know which parts to double-check.

Some tools listed here are still in development. Those pages are labelled In development and the tool is switched off rather than quietly doing something approximate. We would rather show you an honest empty page than a bad result.

Who runs it

CarenCart is an independently operated site published at carencart.com. The tools are free and account-free. The site is set up to carry advertising, so that it can stay that way — see the Disclaimer for how advertising is kept separate from the content, and the Privacy Policy for what it means for your data.

Corrections, bug reports and requests for tools that do not exist yet are genuinely welcome. The contact page reaches a person, and a clear bug report describing what you did, what happened and what you expected is the most useful thing you can send.