Host Stirling PDF without installing anything
Around fifty PDF tools in the browser — merge, OCR, sign, compress — and the file never leaves your own server.
Starting at €8.99/month
Introduction
Stirling PDF installed, updated and backed up by us, on a machine in France. You install nothing and configure no server: the application is online a few minutes after you order, under your own name.
The plan that suits it is App Confort at €8.99/month incl. VAT — 4 GB of memory. Stirling PDF runs on a Java virtual machine, and it does not work alone: LibreOffice is called to convert a Word document or a spreadsheet, Tesseract to recognise the text in a scan, Ghostscript to compress. Each of them claims its share while it runs, and it is a two-hundred-page scanned PDF put through character recognition that sets the real requirement.
It replaces the free PDF websites, with the difference that matters: the file is processed on your side. A payslip, a deed, a priced quotation dropped onto an online service leaves your control and falls under terms nobody reads. Here the document arrives, undergoes the operation asked of it, leaves again, and nothing is kept. For repetitive work, an API and chained operations let you apply the same series of steps to every new document automatically.
What managed hosting changes
Merge, split, rotate, reorder
Assemble ten documents in order, pull out pages 4 to 12, straighten an upside-down page, drop the blank pages from a scan, lay two pages on one sheet: the everyday operations, with a preview before you commit.
OCR: a scan that becomes searchable
Character recognition adds a text layer underneath the image. The document keeps exactly the same appearance, but a word can finally be searched for, copied and indexed.
Sign, stamp, protect, sanitise
Apply a drawn or imported signature, add a watermark or page numbers, set a password or remove one, restrict printing, and strip embedded scripts before passing on a document that came from outside.
Conversions in both directions
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images, HTML or Markdown into PDF, and PDF into images or text. Office conversion goes through LibreOffice, installed alongside the application.
Why hand it over rather than install it
An accountant assembling a file
Twenty receipts scanned separately, merged in order, numbered, then put through OCR so they are searchable before going to the client or the tax office.
A practice handling confidential papers
A deed, a contract, a medical file: those have no business on a free website. Here they are processed on your server and deleted afterwards.
A teacher preparing handouts
Assemble extracts from three sources, put two pages on one sheet to halve the paper, and stamp a "draft" watermark on the working version.
A department digitising its archives
Boxes of scans run through character recognition in batches, then found down to the word. That is the difference between a searchable archive and a pile of images.
A team automating a repetitive job
The API and chained operations apply the same series of steps to every new document dropped in, without going through the interface.
Hosted in France
In our own infrastructure in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, which we operate ourselves. Your documents do not travel halfway around the world to be rotated by ninety degrees.
Frequently asked questions
No. Stirling PDF is not a library: the file is uploaded, processed, returned and then deleted. Nothing is sent to a third-party service — which is precisely the difference with free online tools, whose terms of use often allow uploaded documents to be retained for a while.
Yes, with the language dictionaries installed. The quality of the result depends mostly on the scan: 300 dots per inch, straight and well contrasted, gives near-perfect text; a photo of a creased sheet taken at an angle gives something approximate. It is also the slowest operation: expect several minutes for a two-hundred-page scanned document.
It goes through LibreOffice. A letter, a contract, a structured report come out identical. A complex layout — nested tables, unusual fonts, diagrams drawn inside Word — can shift. For a heavily designed brochure, export from the software that produced it; for everything else, the conversion does the job.
Nothing. You choose the application, fill in the fields it asks for — often an email address and a name — and it goes online. Access arrives by email with the address and the credentials.
Yes, they are part of the service. An application that opens PDFs coming from outside handles, by definition, files it knows nothing about: PDF parsing libraries are updated regularly, and that is not a formality.