Announcing PDFPony.com

I didn’t set out to build a PDF tool.

It started with a simple thought: modern browsers can edit video, run serious WebAssembly apps, and render 3D worlds. So why is “merge two PDFs” still treated like something that needs to happen on a server somewhere?

Around Black Friday I finally cancelled my Adobe subscription. It was pushing about $100/month, and year over year Adobe has been getting more aggressive with policies and product decisions I didn’t love. At a certain point, it stopped feeling like software and started feeling like a toll.

And the alternatives weren’t much better.

If I needed to do a quick task – merge, compress, split, sign – uploading a document to some random website was almost always a non-starter. Not because I had a specific horror story, but because the questions are obvious:

Who owns that server? What country is it in? What’s the retention policy really mean? Who has access? What happens when a “free tool” changes hands?

Plenty of people have had company data exploited or hijacked. You don’t need a personal disaster to recognize a bad default.

So I built a different default.

PDF Pony

PDF Pony is a suite of 140+ PDF tools that runs entirely in your browser.

No uploads. No backend processing. No accounts. No “trust us.” Your files never leave your device because there’s nowhere to send them.

If you want proof, open Chrome DevTools and go to the network tab. You’ll see the site load like any other website, but when you run a tool, you won’t see your PDF being posted to a server. There isn’t one. It’s just a website you download and run.

The promise is simple:

100% privacy and security. I don’t want your documents – you don’t need to send them to me.

This is possible

What I love about the current era of web software is that the ceiling keeps moving. Browsers are real computing environments now. With WebAssembly, Web Workers, and modern JS PDF libraries, local PDF processing is 100% possible.

And honestly, tools like Claude Code (Anthropic doubled my tokens over Christmas – thanks!) have made it easier than ever to explore.

“wait… we can just do this now?”

Turns out, yes.

A feature I thought I’d miss (but didn’t)

The Adobe app I expected to miss most was Adobe Scan.

So I built a PDF camera scanner inside PDF Pony and I think it works better. More importantly, it’s 100% local. No “scan to the cloud,” no account, no silent upload. Just scan then have the PDF on your device.

That one discovery that validated the whole idea for me: the web can deliver “native app” capability without handing your data to someone else.

Some other great tools:

Merge PDFs, Split PDFs, Insert a PDF into a PDF, Flatten a PDF, convert an EPUB into a PDF, compress a PDF, add a QR code to every page of your PDF, add custom stamps to your PDFs, redact text from your PDFs, password protect your PDFs, add a table of contents to your PDF, sign your PDFs, create PDF forms and more!

Speed without servers

Local doesn’t mean slow. I’m sure you’ve got a fast modern computer whose power you underuse 99% of the time.

PDF Pony uses parallel Web Worker processing so heavy operations don’t freeze your browser and it runs faster than you’d expect. Modern machines are powerful. That macbook is powerful. Heck even that Chromebook is. The browser can use that power. The result is a tool that feels instant without relying on infrastructure you can’t see (or don’t own!)

Who it’s for

Anyone who uses PDFs, every day or on occasion.

If you’re a student, a small business owner, an HR person, a lawyer, a political staffer, or just someone trying to get a form done, PDF Pony helps you out. It’s the same set of problems across every profession: “I have a document, I need it slightly different, and I need it done right now.”

A lot of online tools are good products wrapped in a trust problem. PDF Pony is the opposite: the safest workflow is also the easiest workflow. You don’t have to wonder where your file went because it never goes anywhere.

How do I keep the lights on and what’s next?

Right now, hosting is cheap enough that PDF Pony is ad-free, and it’ll stay that way unless traffic becomes overwhelming and I have to start paying some real bills. If I ever add ads, it’ll be because the site is being used so much that it needs the support to keep running.

Next up: more languages, (PDF Pony is now also fully fluent in French, Spanish, German, and Portuguese!) better mobile tooling, and whatever users keep asking for.

Try it and tell me what you think

I want the website to save you money and make less annoyed. That’ll make me happy! If it saves you from paying Adobe for Acrobat or uploading your data to dodgy unknown cloud services, even better.

Use it however you use PDFs, and tell me what you need next.

Email me feature requests at [email protected]

Announcing GIS.tools!

I want to tell you about a new website I’ve made called GIS.tools.

Many of you may know that I enjoy making maps. Online maps. Maps that show us about our world and the data that defines it. I know that puts me in a bit of a rare category of nerdism, but I do enjoy creating them.

My political mapping project continues to gather interest and I often get complimented on it when I go to political conventions. It’s an easy way to find the other political map nerds who travel.

Yes, there’s maybe a couple of dozen of us in Canada – maybe it’s time to start a group chat?

Until then, I continue to scratch the itch and push new frontiers of learning. And that is this project that I’ve been working on with my AI co-workers.

What I’ve built is an extensive online tools website for map makers and I even landed it on GIS.tools.

Yes, that’s the domain name.

I always say the best name for a product is exactly what it is!

For those not in the know, GIS is Geographical Information Systems – the framework for capturing, managing, analyzing, and displaying all types of spatial or location-based data. People who make maps work in the field of GIS.

As you can imagine, there are lot of data in map making, and there’s a lot of file manipulation – often between different file standards from different eras. From Shapefiles, to KML, to GeoJSON – every map nerd has their preference.

Since I never paid for any expensive mapping software, or bothered to learn more than the basics of some of the free products, I’d keep finding myself googling specific online converters, calculators, and raster tools and finding them on a hodgepodge of various websites.

And sometimes the tools just weren’t out there.

So, I’ve been using AI to code these tools and collect them in one place.

I built a Swiss Army knife for map makers.

The result of that effort is GIS.tools.

It has more than 100 GIS tools. From Shapefile to GeoJSON converters, to GeoJSON validators, linters, and fixers, to Hillshade generators, the site probably has what you’re looking for.

And because we live in the current age, I also quite easily translated the website into six different languages. So, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese mapmakers aren’t left out either.

So whether you need an EPSG Reprojector, a CRS Metadata Inspector, an MBTiles validator, or a Heatmap renderer, or are just learning about the tools of the trade, please do check out the site.

Most tools even have example data so you can get an idea of what they do!

You’re probably a fellow map nerd if you’ve read this far. And knowing my people, you probably have a website too. If you appreciate this sort of thing being out in the world for free, I’d appreciate a link so that others can discover it too!

Mapping the results of the 2025 Canadian Federal Election

Yes, it’s finally here. I’ve generated the maps for the 2025 federal election wherein Mark Carney’s Liberal Party elected enough MPs to form a minority Parliament defeating Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives in a stunning upset that was precipitated by Trump tariffs and the sudden departure of Justin Trudeau from Liberal leadership and the Prime Minister’s Office.

This resource has the national, riding, and polling-level results and is highly interactive and educational. Wow!

Canada: economically depressed but elbows up
2025 Canadian General election results – National map

It’s no small task assembling spreadsheet data for 343 ridings and tens of thousands of polling divisions from Elections Canada with GIS data from Natural Resources Canada. Over the years, I’ve written quite a few NodeJS scripts and assembled quite a database which has survived the move between computers, cities, and cloud companies.

Enter the new era of AI.

Adapting old scripts to new data (and new ridings) was made into a task of hours instead of days in order to produce our maps. So please be my guest! Take a look at the vector maps that defined the 2025 Canadian federal election. Zoom in to a riding map to reveal poll-by-poll resolution to find out how your neighbours voted, or appreciate the gradients of partisan support that exist across economically diverse electoral districts.

My blog’s been a bit sleepy for a few years now and every once and a while I check in on what people are searching in order to arrive at stephentaylor.ca. The maps have certainly taken over long-tail search. There are 343 ridings now, after all.

Let’s take a closer look.

Mark Carney formed government winning 169 seats, falling just short of a majority government. He contested and won the riding of Nepean.

Nepean - 2025 Candian General Election
Nepean election results – 2025 Candian General Election

Next door in Carleton, Pierre Poilievre suffered a loss of his own riding that he had held for over 20 years.

Carelton results - 2025 Canadian General Election
Carelton election results – 2025 Canadian General Election

Though managing to increase the Conservative seat total in the 2025 Canadian general election to 144 seats, this long was particularly painful on election night. Poilievre would later go on and contest Battle-River–Crowfoot after the Conservative victor on election night, Damien Kurek, stepped aside for the party boss.

Battle River—Crowfoot results - 2025 Canadian General Election
Battle River—Crowfoot election results – 2025 Canadian General Election

Poilievre wasn’t the only federal leader to lose their seat on election night. NDP leader Jagmeet Singh led his party to its worse result since the party’s founding in 1961.

Until I took a closer look when writing this post, I hadn’t realized he’d lost every poll in his riding of Burnaby Central except for one.

Burnaby Central results - 2025 Canadian General Election
Burnaby Central election results – 2025 Canadian General Election

Justin Trudeau was a deeply unpopular leader who was propped up by Singh’s party who feared a profound election defeat. It turned out that when Trudeau left, Singh was left representing the era he helped defined – and Canadians punished the NDP. Historians will note that Singh didn’t just lose votes to the Liberals but a large chunk of his coalition voted Conservative in 2025. Indeed, parts of Windsor – like Windsor West – went blue for the first time.

Windsor West results - 2025 Candian General Election
Windsor West election results – 2025 Candian General Election

Conservatives predict that we’ll be into an election again soon enough. Carney will want to take advantage of a Conservative Party that is doing some soul-searching and feet-finding while the Trump uncertainty still exists over tariffs and the broader economy. Carney also sees himself as the international deal-maker. Those deals have yet to come to fruition but setting his travel schedule according to the Parliamentary and his government’s razor thin advantage there is going to get old soon for him if it hasn’t already.