True redaction removes the text and images from the file — not a black box on top. Plus real in-place text editing, fill + sign, reorder pages, and OCR.
LaunchEdit text in place, sign, redact, fill forms, and reorganize PDF files in your browser — all on your device. No upload, no subscription.
Drop two versions of a contract or drawing set. Moved notes read as moves, changed values light up digit by digit, and hidden text is named.
LaunchSide-by-side or overlay PDF diff driven by one engine that reads each file into a structured model — text, vector geometry, images, form fields, annotations — and compares the models. Moves show as moves, edits show only where they happened, and any PDF type works without picking a mode.
Drop a Gerber ZIP, an ODB++ .tgz or an IPC-2581 .xml and inspect every layer — compare revisions, snap-to-pad measure, run DRC and preview the board in 3D.
LaunchOpen Gerber, Excellon, ODB++ and IPC-2581 PCB files. Inspect layers, measure traces, run DRC, export to PNG / SVG / DXF.
Open a .step / .stp part and it measures itself: volume, thinnest wall, draft and undercuts on load, and a hole list with a BOM in one click. Measure, section, export STL.
LaunchOpen a STEP / STP part and it measures itself — volume, thinnest wall, draft and undercut checks on load, plus hole detection with a BOM. Measure, section, export STL. Rust + WASM B-rep kernel, runs in your browser.
Compress, merge, split, convert, and manipulate PDF files.
Resize, compress, convert, and transform images.
Convert, compress, and cut audio and video — MP3, WAV, MP4, WebM, Opus — all in your browser, nothing uploads.
Simulate a canning process down to its F0 sterilizing value.
Encrypt files, share encrypted notes as links, and read passport IDs and Windows event logs.
Analyze packet captures, move files between devices, and console into network gear — nothing uploads.
Scan receipts into an expense ledger — your receipts and spending stay on your device.
View, measure, and repair CAD and 3D files — STEP, STL, OBJ, PLY, GLB, 3MF, DXF, and Gerber — right in your browser. Nothing uploads.
All 21 entries, newest first. Click an entry to read it, or go back to the full changelog for the other areas.
Nine tools have left the catalog. Eight did a job a chat assistant now finishes in one request: generating UUIDs, hashing text, converting CSV to JSON, working out one subnet, picking a color, pulling a palette from an image, reading a table from a screenshot, and scaling a recipe. The ninth, Warranty Tracker, saw almost no use. The catalog now centers on the files and calculations an assistant cannot handle for you.
What changed:
The DXF viewer used to draw only outlines — now it renders the whole drawing. Open an AutoCAD .dxf and you'll see the text, dimensions, filled hatches, smooth curves, and even the laid-out paper sheet — all locally in your browser, no upload, no Autodesk account, no installer. Before this, a real architectural or mechanical drawing came through as a skeleton of lines with the labels, dimensions, and fills silently missing.
As always: the file never leaves your device.
Drop a CSV, JSON, NDJSON, or Parquet log and query it with real SQL — joins, window functions, percentiles, the lot — entirely in your browser. The engine is DuckDB compiled to WebAssembly, so your logs and queries never leave your device. It's the "let me slice this file right now without uploading it to a SaaS" tool.
window.loft.tools.invoke('log-query-workbench', { file, sql }) runs a query headlessly over a dropped file.Nothing uploads — open DevTools' Network tab and watch your data stay put. The DuckDB engine downloads once from a CDN on first use, then runs offline.
A real subnet planner, not just a calculator: enter a parent block and the subnet sizes you need and it lays out an optimal VLSM allocation, draws a visual map of your address space, flags overlaps, and finds the next free block of any size. The plan is a file you own — no NetBox install, no server, no account, nothing uploaded.
It's a planner and record-of-truth, not a live discovery tool (a browser can't ping-sweep or query SNMP) — import is how the current reality gets in. Everything runs in your browser.
A new angle measure mode landed in the CAD viewer family. Click three points to get the angle between two edges — a standard CAD-review need that complements the existing distance and point measure modes. Available via the toolbar tool group and the Cmd-K command palette.
Three Autodesk-Viewer-class features landed across the CAD viewer family in a focused parity push:
Phase A also fixed a STEP-parsing bug where the JDC4 model was rendering three phantom rod-shapes because the cylindrical surface trim-curve was being inverted. The fix extends our post-tessellation phantom-extrusion filter from cones-only to cones, cylinders, and toruses.
The new 3D and CAD viewers got the full editor template treatment, lifting them to feature parity with the rest of the Loft Tools editor surface.
What landed:
The CAD splash screen was also brought into alignment with the Gerber viewer's source-of-truth dimensions so the two viewer families feel like siblings.
GLB files with embedded animations now play in the viewer. Open a .glb from a game, simulation, or product visualization and the command palette grows an Animation group with a Play entry per detected clip plus a Pause command.
The same release added a WebXR / VR mode toggle across all six mesh viewers (STL, OBJ, PLY, GLB, 3MF, STEP). On a device with a WebXR-compatible headset, the "Enter VR mode" command drops you into a room-scale immersive view of the loaded model. On devices without XR support the entry stays hidden.
A click-to-draw markup layer landed on the CAD viewers — the kind of annotation surface engineers and designers use in Autodesk Viewer to flag a region during a design review.
Three markup tools:
Markups are stored per file in your browser's local storage, so reopening the same model brings them back. They auto-sync across tabs via the storage event, and their coordinates are normalized so resizing the window doesn't shift them. Pointer events bypass to the underlying viewer when no markup tool is active, so orbit and measure stay live alongside annotations.
STEP files with multi-part assemblies now show real part names in the assembly tree instead of "Mesh 1 / Mesh 2 / Mesh 11". The parser was pulling only the first PRODUCT name and suffixing shell indices; the fix walks all products and maps each shell to its real name.
The same release added a per-part properties panel: select any part in the assembly tree and a key-value table surfaces its STEP-encoded ID, name, and description. This is the same metadata Autodesk Viewer and Fusion 360 surface when you select a component — useful for cross-referencing parts against a bill-of-materials or a CAD-team's part catalog.
Loft Tools now has a full 3D and CAD viewer family. Seven file formats are supported, all running locally in your browser — no uploads, no Autodesk account, no installer.
Formats supported:
What you can do with them:
Everything runs on a new in-browser CAD kernel built specifically for this — no thin wrapper over a remote service. Files never leave your device.
The Gerber Viewer's aperture and drill panels used to be inert lists of data. Now every aperture and drill row is clickable — tap a row and the viewport recenters on the first flash of that D-code while the renderer paints a selection ring on the target pad.
More:
Two correctness fixes in Gerber Viewer's render pipeline.
Thermal-relief (AMTHERM) pads now render as the correct wagon-wheel pinwheel shape in the WebGL fallback path. Previously the four rect cuts were dropped, producing a filled inner pad surrounded by a continuous ring — visually wrong on any board using thermal reliefs to connect pads to copper pour.
The SVG export got a full rewrite. Three compounding bugs in the previous version meant export rarely matched the canvas render:
The rewrite uses per-layer SVG <mask> elements as the polarity arithmetic, mirroring how the canvas renderer composes layers.
The ICS calendar event generator used to fall back to Math.random() for event UIDs on browsers that lacked a built-in UUID API. It now uses cryptographically strong randomness in all cases, so generated events cannot be made to collide with another calendar entry on import.
A focused polish pass after side-by-side comparison against tracespace, pcb-tools, and KiCad GerbView.
The viewer now understands flex and rigid-flex board files. New layer kinds: coverlay (amber translucent), stiffener (opaque grey FR-4), and bondply (warm adhesive). Detection reads both X2 metadata (Coverlay / Stiffener / Bondply file functions per the Ucamco spec) and filename patterns for legacy archives.
The Board Info panel now shows a "Stackup" view when the file ships with material-stackup metadata, rendering the cross-section as a colored vertical legend that matches the canvas. Boards are auto-classified as rigid, flex, or rigid-flex based on stackup composition. Automatic IPC-2223 bend-radius calculations: 6× total flex thickness for static bends, 8× for dynamic, 15× for multilayer flex.
The Gerber viewer just stopped looking like Gerber files and started looking like real PCBs. A KiCad export that previously rendered as a mustard-yellow mess now shows the green soldermask, exposed gold pads, dark drill holes, and FR-4 tan substrate you'd expect.
The mm/inch toggle was being ignored in five display surfaces. When the toggle was set to inches, several panels still displayed millimeter values with an "in" suffix slapped on the end. Fixed sites:
All now route through a single unit-conversion helper. The Netlist CSV download intentionally keeps raw millimeter values for downstream machine consumption.
Modern Gerber files carry rich metadata about every pad — the viewer now surfaces it. The new Inspect mode lets you click any pad to read its net name, reference designator, pin number, component value, footprint, mount type, rotation, and aperture function. Click a net name to highlight every pad on that net across the board.
The Netlist panel now lists canonical nets sorted by pad count when X2 metadata is available, with click-to-highlight for any net. The Aperture Table gained an "Fn" column showing pad function (SMD pad, via pad, BGA pad, etc.). The Job Info panel reads .gbrjob companion files for generation software, creation date, project ID, board thickness, finish, and copper weight.
When a layer is detected by X2 metadata rather than filename guessing, the detection row shows it so you understand why a layer was tagged the way it was.
Phase 1 of the AI-hard-moat pivot. Twenty-one text and design transforms that any chat assistant solves in two seconds were retired, so the catalogue focuses on tools where local compute and file-binary handling actually matter.
Copy honesty sweep: removed every "ad-free" / "no advertising" / "zero ads" claim across the site (ads are planned for the free tier in a later phase), and pulled the "built in the open" framing since the codebase is closed-source. The cookies page now explains what changes when ads ship instead of promising they never will.
Cleaner card layout: tool cards now cap descriptions at three lines so the homepage and category pages render with even card heights regardless of description length.
Every dev-tool that takes pasted text or builds a generated file got a rebuild. Plain textareas became proper code editors. Side-by-side input/output panes replaced the old two-textbox layout. JSON, CSV, and YAML conversions consolidated into one bidirectional tool that auto-detects what you pasted.
Every output pane now shows numbered lines and proper colour coding. JSON keys go cyan, strings green, numbers and booleans orange. The same treatment applies to XML, YAML, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, SQL, Markdown, and JWT decoded payloads. Highlighting loads on demand per language so the page stays light.
The input side stays a plain monospace textarea — that's a deliberate choice. Highlighting while you type breaks cursor placement and copy-paste in browsers; we'd rather you have a textarea that behaves like a textarea, with the highlight reserved for the formatted output you actually want to read or copy.
Previously we shipped three separate tools: CSV → JSON, JSON → CSV, and YAML → JSON. They were the same tool with the input and output swapped. Now there's one tool with two format dropdowns and a swap button between the panes.
/tools/dev-tools/csv-to-json — CSV in, JSON out (default)./tools/dev-tools/json-to-csv — same tool, JSON → CSV by default. URL preserved for SEO and bookmarks./tools/dev-tools/yaml-to-json — same tool, YAML → JSON by default./tools/dev-tools/json-to-yaml — same tool, JSON → YAML by default.Click the round arrow between panes to swap source and target on the fly. Toggle "Auto-detect" and the tool sniffs the format of whatever you paste. Status chips below each pane tell you how many rows / columns were detected and which delimiter the parser picked.
JSON formatter — two new toggles in Advanced Options. BigInt-safe quotes integers larger than 2^53 before parsing so they survive the round-trip without losing precision (banking IDs, Twitter snowflakes, distributed-system tokens — anything that gets silently corrupted by JSON.parse). Auto-repair strips trailing commas, quotes unquoted keys, normalises single-quoted strings, lowercases True/False/None. Useful for Python or JS-object-literal copy-pastes.
Hash generator — pick from MD5, SHA-1, SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512 (turn each on or off independently). Switch to HMAC mode and provide a shared secret to authenticate a payload. Paste a known hash into the Expected hash field for an instant match check across every enabled algorithm at once.
Markdown to HTML — DOMPurify sanitization is on by default with a green "Sanitized" chip when active. Toggle it off and the chip turns amber to remind you the raw HTML is unsafe to render unless you trust the input.
Timestamp converter — completely rebuilt. A live "current epoch" ticker at the top updates every second in seconds / milliseconds / microseconds, each one click-to-copy. Below: input format (Unix-s / Unix-ms / Date-string), timezone selector, and an All-Formats output covering Unix, ISO 8601, RFC 2822, Local, and Relative time. The new Code snippets panel below shows ready-to-paste expressions for that exact moment in JavaScript, Python, Go, Rust, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Bash, and ISO 8601.
UUID generator — auto-generates one UUID on page load (no more empty output). Choose v4 (random) or v7 (timestamp-ordered). Format options for braces, no-hyphens, uppercase, URN. New Decode field: paste a UUID and we extract its version, variant, and (for v1 / v7) the embedded timestamp.
URL encoder/decoder — new URL inspector view appears in the Tips slot when you decode a valid URL. The pasted URL splits into protocol / host / path / query-params / fragment so you can inspect each piece individually.
HTML minifier — new Preserve template syntax toggle. Minify a Blade / EJS / Smarty / Handlebars / PHP template and the {{ … }}, <?= … ?>, {% … %}, <% … %> blocks survive intact while the surrounding HTML still gets crushed.
JWT decoder — claim-validation chips. When the token has an exp claim that's already passed, a red Token expired chip shows. Standard claims iss, sub, aud are surfaced when present.
Regex tester + Diff checker — both now ship with default sample input so the result panel never starts empty. Replace the sample to test your own pattern / your own diff pair.
Every tool's input pane has an Examples dropdown with one or two sample inputs you can load with a click. Every output pane has a Copy button (top-right, where you'd expect) and a Download button beside it that saves the output as the right file type — .json, .css, .min.js, .htaccess, sitemap.xml, uuids.txt, etc.
Advanced Options and Tips live in collapsible cards beneath the panes. Open or close once and we remember your preference for next time.
The old layout was two plain textareas with a tiny center column for controls. No line numbers, no highlight, no Copy on the output, no Examples menu, no Download. We could have papered over each gap one tool at a time, but eight separate text-tool migrations are coming and they all need the same chrome. Rebuilding the underlying template once means every text-flavored tool the site ships from now on inherits the same workspace UX.