Files.co PDF Suite 1.5.0: ten more tools and signing with your own certificate

While putting this release together we did a bit of arithmetic that stung: the website was up to 32 tools and the desktop app was on 16. Which meant anyone who bothered to install the app got half of what they already had for free in a browser tab. There is no defending that.

Version 1.5.0 closes most of that gap, and it is approved on both stores. The app goes from 16 tools to 26, all of them free, and it gains the one thing a browser will never do: signing with the certificate already installed on your own machine.

• macOS — Mac App Store. Apple Silicon and Intel, macOS 13 or later.
• Windows — Microsoft Store. Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit.

If you already have it installed, the store will update it for you. The full technical rundown is in the release history, and the product page, with screenshots and pricing, is at Files.co PDF Suite.

Ten new tools, and all ten are free

Our rule for the desktop app is simple: whatever the website gives away is never charged for here. So these ten land in the free tier — no account, no watermark, no internet.

Remove active content. A PDF can carry JavaScript and automatic actions inside it, and the hard part is not deleting them, it is finding them: they hook into six different places in the document. The open action, the catalogue’s additional actions, the JavaScript name tree, the actions on each page, the ones on each annotation, and the ones on form fields. Cleaning only one leaves the file just as alive, and that is precisely the kind of failure you cannot verify yourself. This tool checks all six.

Remove annotations. Deletes comments, markup, stamps and links by group, never “all of them at once”. The reason is technical and rather neat: as far as the PDF is concerned, a form field is an annotation of subtype Widget. A “delete everything” button would take the form down with it. Links are unticked by default, because removing them kills the document’s table of contents, and nobody expects that when they ask to clean up annotations.

Resize pages. Brings every page to A4, Letter, A3 or whatever you need, rescaling the content rather than just the canvas. It starts on “match the first page” instead of A4, because people who reach this screen usually arrive with a document stitched together from mismatched pages.

Pages per sheet. Two, four, six or nine pages on each sheet, for printing on less paper.

Overlay. Puts a letterhead, a stamp or a template over another PDF, with the option of placing it behind the content so it does not cover the text.

Flatten. Turns form fields and annotations into fixed ink. There is no undo, and the app says so first.

Split by size. Breaks a PDF into chunks that fit under your mail server’s limit. A page that will not fit even on its own is flagged, because handing that file back without a word is exactly what makes the email bounce again.

Attachments. List, add, extract and remove embedded files, looking at both of the places a file can travel inside a PDF.

Visual signature. Stamps an image with transparency onto the document. It is a simple signature, not a qualified one, and it is deliberately kept apart from certificate signing in the app so the two never get confused.

Convert images. Between PNG, JPEG and WebP, with SVG as input only.

With those ten, the app sits at 26 of the website’s 32. The remaining ones lean on heavier pieces, OCR among them, and they are on the way.

Signing with your certificate, without the key ever leaving your machine

This is the big Pro addition, and it is also why Pro exists at all: a browser cannot touch the system certificate store or talk to a card reader. A native app can.

Version 1.5.0 signs in PAdES-B with the certificate you already have installed. On Windows it uses the user store and works with keys marked as non-exportable, which is exactly how Spanish authorities and the FNMT install their certificates. On macOS the certificate is imported into a keychain owned by the app, with no odd dialogs, and you can use your login keychain too.

The private key never leaves your system. All that reaches the signing engine is a few bytes and the signature the system hands back.

Three warnings we would rather give you here than have you discover halfway through some paperwork:

• Whether your signature is qualified depends on your certificate, not on the app. The app does its part; the legal weight comes from the certificate you use.
• This is not the visual signature tool. If you also want a drawn signature visible on the page, stamp the image before signing — doing it afterwards breaks the signature.
• Timestamping (PAdES-T) is not there yet. It is the next thing we want to add, and in the meantime the screen tells you so rather than leaving you to assume.

Presets stop being a shortcut and become a workflow

Until now, a saved preset was one tool and its settings under a name. From 1.5.0 it can be a sequence: compress, then watermark, then number the pages. One click, or straight from a watched folder with nobody sitting there.

The ceiling is eight steps. That is not stinginess: a chain of fifteen is a chain nobody can debug on the day the result comes out wrong.

Batch processing grows too, from 5 tools to 11, and watched folders with it. Encrypt, remove active content, remove annotations, flatten, pages per sheet and resize pages all join in.

There is one exception worth understanding: the encryption password is asked for when the batch starts and is never stored. As a result, a preset that encrypts cannot watch a folder. When the file lands at three in the morning there is nobody to ask for the password, and keeping it around to solve that would be the opposite of how this app works.

Two fixes that deserve their own paragraph

Images with transparency came out on a black rectangle. When converting images to PDF, the alpha channel was dropped instead of composited, leaving whatever the encoder had written underneath the invisible pixels on full display. A cut-out logo ended up on a black background. It is composited properly now.

A single corrupt preset used to empty the whole list, on both platforms, without a word. Presets are now decoded one by one, and an unreadable one no longer takes the rest down with it.

What has not changed

Nothing that matters. Your files still never leave your computer: no uploads, no account, no telemetry on your documents. Cut its network access and the app carries on, because it never needed the network to begin with.

The 26 tools are free forever. Pro is still a one-time purchase — $8.99 until 30 September 2026, $24.99 after that — and it unlocks working at volume plus the things a browser cannot do. Anyone who bought it earlier gets all of this without paying again, which is rather the point of a purchase instead of a subscription.

Get it on the Mac App Store or the Microsoft Store, read the detail in the release history, or go back to the app overview. And if you would rather not install anything, the browser tools are where you left them, with nothing uploaded.