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What’s new

What’s new on Altto

New tools, improvements and fixes, newest first. The tools are tested regularly with real files, and anything that changes is listed here.

12 October 2026

  • New tool: Altto Layout, a free Publisher alternative. Open your Microsoft Publisher (.pub) files with their layout — text boxes, linked text, pictures and Publisher’s clipart, shapes, colours and master pages — and carry on editing them, or start a flyer, poster, newsletter, menu, certificate, card or invitation from a template. Save as PDF (with bleed and crop marks for printing), PNG, JPG or Word. Nothing is uploaded.
  • New tool: Edit PDF. Click any text in a PDF and change it, in the PDF’s own font, size and colour; the paragraph re-flows as you type. The old words are taken out of the file, not hidden under a white box. Add text, pictures, boxes, arrows, highlights, drawing and white-out, fill in forms, and find and replace across the whole document. Like everything on Altto, the PDF never leaves your device.
  • Edit PDF can now turn, move, add and delete pages; read scanned pages so their words can be changed (in a matching typewriter face where the page was typed); and it finds paragraphs with the same engine as PDF to Word.
  • PDF to Word tables: a column heading that wraps onto a second line stays one heading, a row name that wraps onto an indented line stays one row, several rows of words drawn inside one ruled row become their own rows, and a table’s top is no longer confused with the page’s header band. Text in a plain font named only by its family (“Helvetica”, “ArialMT”) is no longer made bold.

11 October 2026

  • New tool: Organise PDF. Every page of one or more PDFs on one screen: reorder, rotate, delete, duplicate, merge in more files, split into separate files, and add page numbers or a watermark as you save.
  • New tool: Convert to PDF. Drop in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, text, web pages, images and PDFs in any mix and get one combined PDF, or one PDF for each file.
  • New tool: Publisher file opener. Microsoft Publisher has been retired, so .pub files are getting hard to open. It recovers the text and pictures and saves them as Word, PDF or text. It doesn’t keep the original layout, and the page says so. There’s also a guide to opening .pub files now Publisher has gone.
  • New: the PDF to Word accuracy benchmark. Altto’s converter tested on 200 public PDFs with hand-checked answers, next to 14 published results from other converters, with the method, the weak spots and the data to download.
  • New guide: which app opens which file? A table of 16 common file types and what opens each on Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android.
  • New: free widgets for your website. Copy-paste a word counter or text case converter onto your own site. They run in the visitor’s browser and make no network calls.
  • Passport Photo Checker: rules re-checked against GOV.UK, results now open with an overall verdict and a tally of checks passed, and a retake guide explains how to fix anything flagged.
  • A few guides and tools now have a clearly labelled “Recommended” box for jobs Altto can’t do, such as accounting software for Making Tax Digital or sending a document for other people to sign. Some of those links earn Altto a small commission; how Altto makes money explains it.
  • PDF to Excel now places every value in the right column by where it sits on the page, so bank statements and other tables with empty cells keep each amount under its heading, and amounts arrive as real numbers Excel can add up. New guide: how to convert a bank statement PDF to Excel without uploading it.
  • Every tool page now has its own picture for when you share a link to it.
  • Fixed: tools that load a PDF or image library could fail to start on the live site because of a redirect loop. Every library now loads normally.
  • Tidied up across the site: the same tool count and footer everywhere, the copyright year written into every page, and the button at the top of tool pages now goes to All tools instead of away to the PDF to Word converter.

10 October 2026

  • New tool: Image Converter. Any image (JPG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, AVIF, GIF, BMP, SVG and more) to JPG, PNG or WebP, with resizing, in one batch.
  • New: a “What next?” card after every tool. Carry your result straight into the next tool (compress it, merge it, sign it, turn it into a PDF) without picking the file again. The file stays in your browser.
  • New tool: JPEG XL to JPG. Chrome started opening JPEG XL (.jxl) images this month, but most apps, upload forms and older browsers still can’t. It turns .jxl files into JPG or PNG, one at a time or in a batch, and works even in browsers that can’t open JPEG XL themselves.
  • New tool: RTF Viewer. WordPad has gone from Windows 11, so .rtf files no longer open with a double-click. Open RTF and old Windows Write (.wri) files in the browser and save them as Word, PDF or text.
  • New tool: Skype Chat Viewer. Open the export file Skype gave you, with no extracting or command line, then read, search and save every chat.
  • New tool: MTD Spreadsheet Maker. A free Making Tax Digital for Income Tax records workbook for sole traders and landlords, with HMRC’s categories, your tax year’s deadlines and running quarterly totals.
  • New tool: AI Image Checker. Reads a picture’s Content Credentials to show whether it says it was made or edited with AI, who signed it and whether it has changed since.
  • New tool: E-invoice Viewer. Opens XRechnung, UBL and Peppol invoices, and the data inside Factur-X and ZUGFeRD PDFs, as a normal readable invoice.

5 October 2026

  • New tools: JFIF to JPG (lossless), AVIF to JPG, SVG to PNG, Excel to CSV, PDF to Text, PDF Page Counter, Remove PDF Metadata, Flatten PDF, PDF to Black and White and a UK Passport Photo Checker.
  • Compress PDF and Compress Image can now aim for an exact size, such as 100KB, 200KB or 1MB for PDFs and 20KB or 50KB for photos.
  • PDF to JPG can save pages as PNG; Image to PDF takes iPhone HEIC photos and can make A4 or US Letter pages; Merge PDF can reverse the page order; and Delete PDF Pages can find blank pages for you.
  • New guides: why can’t I edit my PDF?, how to sign a PDF without printing it, how to remove a password from a PDF, and comparisons with Adobe Acrobat and Sejda.
  • Safer with files from other people: every tool that opens PDFs now uses a hardened PDF reader, so a booby-trapped PDF can’t run anything on the page. The code libraries the tools rely on are now checked against their published fingerprints every time they load, and a changed copy is refused.
  • HTML to PDF and Word to PDF now strip out anything in a file that could load another page or run code, and JSON to CSV keeps text that looks like a spreadsheet formula as plain text, so it can’t run when the file is opened in Excel.
  • PDF to Word: fill-in forms now look like the original, with tick boxes, boxes to write in, lines to write on and buttons where the PDF has them.
  • PDF to Word: letterheads, invoices, receipts, certificates, menus and posters keep their layout, including framed headings, tinted panels and centred lines.
  • PDF to Word: tables keep their width and place, including tables that run over several pages, and pages with columns that start at different heights come through as they were.
  • PDF to Word: paragraphs break their lines where the PDF’s do, small capitals and old-style numbers in books are kept, picture captions stay with their pictures, and long scanned documents use less memory.
  • The text-recognition engine for scanned PDFs, Word Counter’s grammar checker and the AI tools’ main engine are now served from Altto itself or checked against their published fingerprints, and our anonymous usage recordings can no longer see any text on the page, so nothing from your files can appear in them.
  • PDF to Word: maths and science papers keep their thin lines (fraction bars, the rule over footnotes), and equations with a big ∑ or ∫ sign come through whole.
  • PDF to Word: long documents keep each page in step with the PDF, contents pages keep their italic titles, a pull quote keeps its closing quotation mark, and signature lines on certificates run their full length.

4 October 2026

  • PDF to Word: italics, underlines and crossed-out text are kept, and converting carries on if you switch to another tab.
  • PDF to Word: flyers, posters with several columns, banner headers, striped tables, logos side by side and notes at the foot of the page come through much closer to the original.
  • PDF to Word: colours from print-ready PDFs look the way a PDF reader shows them, and more fonts are kept as themselves, including Arial Black, Impact, Comic Sans and Calibri Light.
  • PDF to Word: maths and science papers come out sharper, with equations where they were, and tables keep their row heights and cell colours.
  • PDF to Word: scanned pages read more accurately, including right-aligned addresses.
  • Our Terms of Use have been updated.

29 September 2026

  • Every tool page now has its own tips and answers to common questions, written for that tool, and the About page and Privacy Policy have been updated.
  • QR Code Generator rebuilt: nine kinds of code (links, text, Wi-Fi, contacts, email, phone, SMS, locations and events), logos, colours, frames, PNG, SVG and PDF downloads, a built-in scan check, and bulk creation from a list.
  • Text to Speech now only lists voices that run on your device.
  • Fixed: PDF to JPG could stall when its browser tab was in the background.
  • Fixed: TXT to PDF now handles tabs, page breaks, “Unicode” (UTF-16) and older Windows text files, and splits lines too long for the page.
  • Fixed: Excel to PDF no longer stops on symbols, emoji or line breaks in a cell, shows dates, £ and % the way Excel does, and leaves out hidden rows, columns and sheets.
  • Fixed: PowerPoint to PDF no longer stops on symbols, keeps line breaks, and carries long slides on to the next page instead of cutting them short.
  • Fixed: HTML to PDF now includes text from every part of the page, and long web addresses no longer run off the edge.
  • Fixed: Word to PDF turns documents with footnotes into real, selectable text, and documents in Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese or with emoji into readable pages instead of blank ones.
  • Fixed: Compress PDF keeps black-and-white scans and phone photos looking the way they should.
  • Fixed: JPG to PNG and the other batch image tools no longer drop a file when two share a name, Compress Image keeps your original when it can’t make it smaller, and GIF Maker turns see-through areas white instead of black.

28 September 2026

  • Tool pages are lighter on phones: each tool’s code now starts when you first use it, and a file dropped in straight away is no longer missed.

27 September 2026

  • New tool: Sign PDF. Draw, type or upload your signature, add initials and dates, and fill in PDF forms.
  • New guides comparing Altto with Smallpdf, iLovePDF and PDF24.
  • The AI tools now show what kind of computer they need, with a live check of your device.

26 September 2026

25 September 2026

  • A new, cleaner look across the whole site.
  • The PDF to Word converter was tested against dozens of real PDFs and much improved: pictures, tables, charts, forms, columns and designed pages such as flyers now come through far closer to the original.

24 September 2026

23 September 2026

22 September 2026

20 September 2026

  • New tool: BMI Calculator, with a BMI chart guide.
  • Quality checks on every tool, with fixes to Image Cropper, TXT to PDF and HTML to PDF, quality settings in HEIC to JPG and WebP to JPG, a third level in Compress PDF, and real, selectable text in Word to PDF.
  • Fixed pages that scrolled sideways on phones.

19 September 2026

  • Merge PDF: turn pages round before merging.
  • Share and add-to-desktop buttons on every tool page.

18 September 2026

17 September 2026

16 September 2026

Before that

Altto started as a single PDF to Word converter and grew to around 30 tools, covering PDF editing, image conversion, Word, Excel and PowerPoint conversion, QR codes, passwords, a word counter and more.