Everything you can do to a page
The pages are shown in the order they will have in the new file. A caption on each gives its new position and where it was in the file you opened, like Page 3 (was 7). Badges mark pages that are copies, blank, from another file, or turned.
- Select: click a page, Shift click for a run, or use All, None, Odd, Even and Invert. In a long document, type numbers like
1-3, 5, 8-in Select by number. Small, Medium and Large change how big the pages are shown. - Move: drag a page by its grip, or press the left and right arrow keys while the grip has focus. To start and To end send every selected page to that end and keep their order. Reverse order puts the last page first.
- Turn: the buttons on a page turn it left or right, and Left and Right above the pages turn every selected page. Turns add to a page's own rotation.
- Delete: the cross on a page, the Delete button, or the Delete key. A deleted page leaves the list, and Undo brings it back.
- Duplicate: puts a copy right after each selected page. The copies share the page's content, so they add almost nothing to the file.
- Blank pages: after each selected page, at the start or at the end. A blank page is as big as the page it is placed next to, as that page is shown, so a landscape page gets a landscape neighbour. With no pages left to copy from, it is Letter or A4, chosen from your browser's language.
- Add a PDF: puts all the pages of another file at the end, or after the last selected page. The added pages are selected so you can move or turn them at once, and each keeps its own size.
The line above the pages counts pages and changes, like 12 pages, 3 changes. Undo and Redo go through up to 200 steps, and a tooltip says which step each will take. Reset returns to the pages you opened, and is itself a step you can undo.
What the new file keeps and what it leaves behind
The new file is built by copying the pages you arranged into a fresh PDF. They are not redrawn or compressed again: text stays text you can select and search, and pictures keep their quality. Links to websites, highlights, sticky notes, stamps and other comments stay on their pages. So do the layers that the pages use, and a layer that was switched off in your file is still switched off in the new one. Each file is copied once, so fonts and images that every page shares are not duplicated when you rearrange pages or add blank ones.
Some things belong to the whole document rather than to a page, and are not carried over: bookmarks, links that jump to another page of the same file, named destinations, accessibility tags and the document language, the order and grouping of the layers panel, page labels such as roman numerals, and extra metadata. A fillable form keeps the look of what was typed in, but the form itself is not carried over, so many viewers will not let you edit its fields. The title, author, subject and keywords come from the file you opened.
Password protected PDFs, and PDFs with only permission settings, are encrypted. ClipLime cannot decrypt files, so it names the file instead of producing a broken result. If you may, print or export it to a new PDF without protection in a PDF viewer, and use that copy.
Long documents, mixed sizes and a second file
Thumbnails are drawn only for pages near the screen, so a document of a few hundred pages stays quick to scroll and edit. On larger screens the bar with the buttons stays in view while you scroll. Turning every page, or reversing the order, stays quick even for 300 pages, because only the pages that change are redrawn.
Pages of different sizes and orientations can share one file. That lets you bring in a page scanned separately, put it where it belongs and turn it upright. To join whole files in order, merge PDF is quicker. To only turn pages, rotate PDF edits the file without rebuilding it, so it keeps bookmarks and form fields.
The pages and the new file are held in your browser's memory, which needs several times the size of the files. ClipLime warns when they are large for your device, around 60 MB on a phone and a few hundred megabytes on a computer.
Check the result before you send it
When you press Save PDF, the new file is opened again and every page is checked for its size and rotation before you can download it. A preview shows all its pages in order, and the size before and after. If something looks wrong, Keep editing returns to the pages with every step still there. Edits live only on the page, so the browser asks before you close the tab or reload while you have unsaved changes.