Changelog

Check it before you save it

• A mark that clips half a word used to leave the other half legible — and a descender or a soft antialiased edge is often enough to read a name back. Marks now snap outwards to cover any text they touch, so catching part of a word removes all of it. There's a toggle for when you're covering something that isn't text, like a signature.
• Saving now goes through a review: you see the flattened result exactly as it will be written, page by page, and save from there or go back and fix a mark. The review and the save call the same code, so the preview can't promise something the file doesn't deliver.
• Redacted areas bleed a little past the mark on export, which takes the faint edge pixels that can outline a letter shape.

PDF Redactor

Redaction as it's usually done is a lie: a black rectangle drawn in a PDF editor covers the text on screen while leaving it sitting in the file, where anyone can select and copy it back out. Law firms and government agencies have leaked confidential material this way more than once, believing the job was done.

This marks what should go and then removes it. Any page carrying a mark is flattened into an image before the black is applied, so the text objects underneath stop existing rather than being hidden. Pages you don't mark are copied through untouched and keep their text. The trade-off is stated plainly on the page rather than buried: flattened pages are no longer selectable or searchable, because they are pictures of pages. You can check the work yourself — open the saved file and search for something you removed.

A more honest promise

• The workshop's pitch used to read "Free. No ads, no trackers, no signup walls." That was a promise about everything here, forever. It now reads that every tool on the bench is free to use with no account — the same thing a visitor cares about, without painting over the possibility of paid extras later. Better to narrow it now than quietly edit it later.

A dark theme, everywhere

• Every page now has a dark theme. Your choice is remembered across the whole site, so switching on one tool switches all of them. A first visit follows whatever your system is already set to.
• Readmark had been the only tool with a theme option since it was built first. Now it's the same switch, in the same place, on every page.
• The bench's cards and captions turned out to be hardcoded to light-mode colours, so dark mode left near-black text on a near-black background. Those are proper design tokens now and shift with the theme.
• Changelog and Feedback moved into the header of every page. They were previously only reachable from the footer, which is a poor place to hide a bug report.

The last of the old chrome

• Readmark was still wearing the layout it was born with: two stacked bars, one running the full width of the window while everything else sat in a container. It now has the same single header as the other tools, and its toolbar only appears once a document is open.
• The page now opens with the same title-and-description block as the rest of the workshop. A quiet place to read survives as a subtitle beside the name.
• The theme button had no label until you clicked it, because the label was only being set by the toggle rather than on load.

Saying "clean" when it means clean

• A cleaned photo was still being flagged amber for "metadata found" — because it still held its ICC colour profile, which the tool keeps deliberately. Removing it would shift your colours and it carries nothing personal. Colour profiles are now listed separately as kept, and a file with nothing identifying left reads as clean.
• ICC profiles are usually split across several blocks, so they were being listed three or four times over. Now listed once.

Photo Metadata Cleaner

Photos carry more than the picture — phones attach GPS coordinates, camera serial numbers, timestamps and software details without telling you. Drop photos in to see exactly what's hidden inside, with the location called out plainly, then download clean copies. JPEGs have their metadata blocks removed surgically rather than being re-compressed, so the picture itself is untouched. Where orientation was stored in the metadata being removed, the rotation is drawn into the pixels instead so nothing ends up sideways.

Changelog and feedback

• Added this page — one changelog covering every tool.
• Added a feedback form that works without any third-party service, ad network, or tracking script.

Brought into the workshop's look

• Readmark was built before the Toolsmyths identity existed, so it had its own palette and typefaces and looked like a different site. It now uses the workshop's paper-and-ink colours, the same four typefaces, and carries the header and footer the other tools have.
• Dark mode stays — it matters for a reading tool — but is now a warm dark drawn from the brand rather than a cool grey.
• Fonts are self-hosted here too, so no page on the site calls out to a third party.

Workshop icon and share image

• Readmark predated the Toolsmyths identity, so it had been running since launch with no favicon, no canonical URL and no share image. All three added.

Clearer instructions on the bench

• Added a legend above the pages spelling out what you can do: click to select, double-click to view full size, drag to reorder, shift-click for a range. None of that was discoverable before.
• The ⤢ view button now sits visibly on every page instead of only appearing on hover — which meant it didn't exist at all on touch screens.

Screenshot Beautifier

Paste a screenshot straight from the clipboard and it lands framed on a clean background. Twelve backgrounds plus a custom colour, sliders for padding, corners and shadow, optional window chrome, and shape presets for social posts. Save a PNG or copy the finished image back to the clipboard.

Full-size page viewer

• Thumbnails alone meant trusting a 150px image before saving. You can now open any page full size, page through the whole bench with the arrow keys, zoom in steps, and snap to fit or actual size.
• Rotate and select from inside the viewer, so you can inspect a page, fix it, and move on.
• Pages render at your display's pixel density, so text is genuinely sharp rather than an upscaled thumbnail.

PDF Toolkit

Merge, split, extract, rotate and reorder — without picking a mode first. Drop in any number of PDFs and every page lands on a bench as a thumbnail. Select what you want, drag pages into a new order, then save the lot as one file or just the pages you picked. Undo goes forty steps deep. Password-protected and damaged files say so plainly instead of failing silently.

The workshop opens

• toolsmyths.com went live with the anvil-and-flame mark, drawn from the Smyths Trading Co. family.
• Fonts are self-hosted, so the site makes no third-party requests at all — the "no trackers" promise is architectural, not aspirational.

The contents list now reaches the last section

• The sidebar highlighted whichever heading you'd scrolled past, but the final section could never light up — the page ran out of scroll before it reached the detection band. Now tracked by position, with an explicit rule that reaching the bottom selects the last section.
• Fixed a related bug in passing: scrolling upward could highlight the wrong entry.

Readmark

A Markdown viewer that treats reading as the point rather than an afterthought bolted onto an editor. Drop in a .md file and read it properly typeset — tables, code with copy buttons, task lists, Mermaid diagrams, an auto table of contents, dark mode, and a clean print stylesheet. Everything renders in the browser; the file never leaves the machine.