KillerPDF v1.7.5

KillerPDF 1.7.5 is a small maintenance release that closes several visible annotation, scrolling, shortcut, theme, and localization regressions. It keeps the faster scrolling introduced in 1.7.4, makes Transform trustworthy with freshly placed text, and gives the text annotation toolbar a cleaner two-row layout.

Added

• Shift+mouse wheel now scrolls wide pages horizontally, using the same scrolling path as a tilt wheel (#209, thanks Ryokoxx).
• Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I and Ctrl+U now bold, italicize and underline while you are editing a text box. They were listed in the shortcuts for weeks without ever being wired up.
• Hungarian OCR completes the twelve-language OCR catalog, so every language available for the KillerPDF interface now has a matching downloadable recognition model.

Changed

• The text annotation toolbar now uses a deliberate two-row layout: font above size, text color above fill color, and text opacity above fill opacity. It is taller but substantially narrower, with each lower control aligned beneath its corresponding upper control instead of leaving Fill Opacity stranded on an accidental wrapped row.
• The sidebar moved from Ctrl+B to F9, and moving it left or right from Ctrl+Shift+B to Shift+F9. Ctrl+B was documented as bold and as the sidebar at the same time, and it was the sidebar that answered. F9 was the one function key with nothing of its own to do: the four view modes still have F5 to F8, and the wheel over the view still cycles them.
• The current-page span badge now casts a small shadow beneath its rectangle, while its text remains independently rendered and crisp. The 98SE theme keeps the badge flat with the rest of its classic chrome.

Fixed

• Rotating a page now keeps upright text boxes, images, and signatures inside the new page bounds. Their centers still follow the rotated sheet, but an item near the old long edge is clamped before it can become invisible and unrecoverable off-page (#169, thanks terada-d).
• Fast wheel scrolling in Single Page and Two-Page views no longer carries its remaining momentum into an accidental page change at the edge. Scrolling keeps its existing speed; changing pages requires a deliberate second wheel gesture (#205, thanks 1mk3r).
• Transform now commits an active text box before building its preview, so text placed immediately before opening Transform is included in both the preview and the transformed page.
• Grid zoom now updates every page seam in one layout pass, so the pages no longer resize first and then visibly settle one border at a time as their refreshed bitmaps arrive.
• Switching themes, accents, or languages with an annotation or crop bar open now rebuilds that bar completely in both split panes. This fixes controls retaining colors from the previous theme, including the light-theme mismatch, and keeps code-built crop labels, tooltips, and buttons current without reopening the tool.
• Nine dialogs, including the install and update prompts, now preserve their intended line breaks. The strings carried the breaks but not the attribute that stops XAML collapsing them, so adding more had no effect (#231, thanks bovirus).
• Shortcut key and mouse names, including Ctrl, Shift, Home, End, Delete, Click and Scroll, are now translatable in all twelve languages. The list and visual keyboard are generated from one shared table, fixing the missing Alt+M entry and inconsistent navigation descriptions while preventing the two views from drifting again (#230, thanks bovirus).
• Shared dialog buttons now translate OK, Cancel, Yes, and No, including the custom color picker (#227, thanks Mr-Update).
• Recent files now translate the missing label instead of leaving it in English (#227, thanks Mr-Update).
• Annotation copy, paste, and delete confirmations now use the active language and the correct singular or plural message (#227, thanks Mr-Update).
• Search now translates its empty, error, summary, navigation, and close messages. Its result field is wider so longer translated states are not clipped (#227, thanks Mr-Update).
• OCR model downloads now translate their progress and cancellation hints, including multi-model downloads, and flatten/export progress is translated as well (#227, thanks Mr-Update).
• The portable launcher now publishes cleanly with the .NET 10 SDK without trying to copy an unused binding-redirect configuration file.

KillerPDF v1.7.4

KillerPDF 1.7.4 keeps the convenience of one portable download while installing as a normal multi-file application, cutting initial startup time substantially. This release also fixes annotation rotation, form fields on comma-decimal locales, installation scope, and a range of viewer, dialog, and localization problems. Hungarian localization and page image export are included as well.

Added

• "Export page as image" on the Pages panel's right-click menu, including multi-page selections (#207, thanks 1mk3r).
• Hungarian (hu-HU) localization, the twelfth interface language, in the language picker as "Magyar" (PR #214, thanks CsokiHUN).
• Hide the toolbar from its right-click menu or Alt+M, and full screen no longer sits over other applications when you switch away (#215, thanks Subjuntivos).
• Translations can be tested in a normal install and reload on every save of the file; TRANSLATING.md has the steps (#211, thanks bovirus).
• The page badge fires on grid scrolling and names the visible span (#197, thanks Ryokoxx).

Changed

• KillerPDF now remains one portable download while installing as a normal multi-file application. The portable EXE carries one compressed, verified payload and cleans up its temporary files after use; installed shortcuts launch the inner app directly, avoiding Costura extraction and reducing measured first startup by about 40% on the development machine (#189, thanks ags1234). The new package is also roughly 34% smaller than the previous woven EXE.
• Builds no longer risk the net48 CS8336 attribute collision introduced by compiler-generated polyfills (PR #218, thanks Ryokoxx).

Fixed

• Printing now composes and spools on a dedicated thread, keeping the progress window responsive throughout large jobs (PR #228, thanks Ryokoxx). Print layout choices are frozen when the job begins so keyboard input during preparation cannot change N-up grouping or skip or duplicate pages.
• Rotating a page no longer deletes the document's unsaved annotations; they now turn with the page (#169, thanks terada-d).
• Form fields saved on systems whose decimal separator is a comma (German and most European locales) now get valid appearance streams; they previously came out blank or garbled with repeated, re-wrapped text in other viewers and in print, flatten, and export, thanks Thomas.
• Print, flatten, image export, and thumbnails no longer draw a form field twice when its stored appearance disagrees with the regenerated one.
• Installation scope is now guarded end to end: a per-user install cannot sit beside an all-users install, existing dual installs are detected with an offer to remove the inactive copy, converting to all-users removes the older per-user copy, and machine-wide uninstall requests administrator access instead of reporting success after permission failures.
• The Open dialog no longer crashes where Explorer's Quick Access cannot be read, such as under Wine and CrossOver; the pinned folders and drives still list (#210, thanks Ximelay).
• Opening a PDF from Explorer while KillerPDF is still starting no longer crashes; the file now opens once the window is ready (#202, thanks tgv123456).
• Dropping a damaged PDF on the Pages panel now offers the same repair the Open dialog offers, instead of silently ignoring the file (#203, thanks 1mk3r).
• After an install relaunch or split-pane session restore, the sidebar now attaches the active pane's thumbnail cache before the first visible frame instead of remaining blank until the user clicks a pane.
• Snapping, maximizing, or restoring the window keeps the split panes' proportions, and a sidebar you closed stays closed when a tab loads its document.
• Grid view no longer drops its last column into the next row at certain pane widths.
• In grid view, drawing on a page or clicking one of its annotations now selects that page, as a plain click already did.
• Image pickers (Insert Image, image signatures and stamps, watermark) now return to the last folder an image was picked from, instead of wherever the last PDF was opened.
• Dragging the title bar downward restores a maximized window from anywhere along the bar, including over the logo, on every theme (#206, thanks 1mk3r).
• The page list's top and bottom edge fades are restored on every theme except 98SE, which deliberately has none. Switching away from 98SE now explicitly restores them instead of carrying its zero-opacity setting into the next theme.
• The empty-state recent-files panel now responds to ordinary window resizing, hiding before it crowds the drop target and returning when the pane has enough room.
• The theme and language tooltips are no longer all caps, the VIEW shortcut category matches the other headings, and the zoom shortcuts read Ctrl++ instead of Ctrl+=, in every language (PR #216, thanks Mr-Update).
• The "Show current file size" shortcut description is translated in every language (#217, thanks Mr-Update).
• Unsigned local development packages can now exercise the complete install path, while public release launchers retain a non-bypassable digital-signature requirement.
• Every remaining hardcoded English string is now translated in all twelve languages. This includes dialog titles, file-picker filters, error and confirmation dialogs, status messages, busy overlays, and the default DRAFT watermark text. Polish also gained the seven newest theme names (#227, thanks Mr-Update).
• The annotate settings bars (text, draw, highlight, line, shape) now reflow in single-row groups on a narrow window or split pane; anything that would need a third row collapses into an overflow chevron, least-used controls first.
• A render failure partway through streaming grid tiles no longer strands the remaining pages blank; the failed page is skipped and the stream retries once.
• Grid view opened in an unfocused split pane now fills the pane width instead of keeping a surround margin and showing a horizontal scrollbar.
• A print page range ending in a huge number no longer freezes the app, and a range matching no pages now says so and disables Print instead of spooling the whole document (PRs #222 and #220, thanks Ryokoxx).
• Checkbox labels now wrap instead of clipping in languages with longer text, and dropdown lists respect their intended maximum height (PRs #224 and #225, thanks Ryokoxx).
• The print preview's scrollbar and chevrons now follow the theme, and visiting the 98SE theme no longer leaves its gray chip color behind on other themes (PR #219, thanks Ryokoxx).
• The color picker's OK button is readable at rest on every theme; it previously only showed its label on hover, and its Cancel button and remaining tooltips are now translated (#227, thanks Mr-Update).
• On the 98SE theme, the color picker now wears the classic caption bar and raised window frame with beveled buttons, code-built dialogs are square-cornered, and the annotate settings bars dock as flush full-width toolbar bands with the proper 2px bevel instead of floating with a thin misdrawn edge and leftover film grain.

KillerPDF v1.7.3

1.7.3 corrects theme accents and restores the missing visual preview in image-selection dialogs.

Fixed

• The active tab's ring and underline now follow the chosen accent color; they stayed on the theme's base color under any other accent, on every theme.
• Image-selection dialogs now include a live preview pane for image import, image signatures, image stamps, and Insert Image.

KillerPDF v1.7.2

KillerPDF 1.7.2 completes the split-pane viewer refactor and builds on it with seven new themes, Polish localization, book layout, Levels, expanded print controls, per-pane night mode, and a substantial round of rendering, memory, form, and interface fixes.

Added

• Added 98SE, Ectoplasm, Decay, Mourning, Sepulchre, Delirium, and Malaise themes.
• The print dialog has paper size and paper source selectors, and its settings are organized into collapsible PRINTER, LAYOUT, and OUTPUT sections (#186, thanks demo1866 and adeit).
• Two-Page view has a book layout option: the cover page displays alone, so facing pages pair like a physical book (#193, thanks TeutonJon78).
• Comb text fields are supported: typing is capped at the cell count and the saved value places one character per printed box, like Acrobat (#158, thanks flywire).
• Clicking the status line shows the open file's size for a moment, then restores what was there.
• Text selection follows columns: dragging down one column of a two-column PDF no longer sweeps the neighboring column, and copied text comes out in column order (#185, thanks twtscurry30-ai).
• The Transform tool has a LEVELS section - black point, white point, and midtones - for rescuing pale, hard-to-read scans, applied like its other corrections (#174, thanks 1mk3r).
• Night-mode invert is per pane in split view: the moon flips only the focused pane, and its rail icon follows pane focus.
• Polish (pl-PL) localization, the eleventh interface language, in the language picker as "Polski" (#191, thanks Fresta24).

Changed

• The page number shows in a corner badge that slides away when the view settles, replacing the tooltip that followed the cursor (#197, thanks Ryokoxx).
• The Outlines sidebar opens with top-level bookmarks visible and deeper levels folded, and expand/collapse choices now stick across tab switches and edits instead of re-expanding everything.
• Keyboard access and context-menu hints were audited for 1.7.2: the file-size action has Shift+F4, and applicable menus now show icons and shortcuts.

Fixed

• The re-sharpen pass renders at device resolution instead of twice it, sharply cutting memory use on large documents, and re-renders on DPI changes (#189, PR #194, thanks Ryokoxx).
• The page bitmap cache is now budgeted in bytes (~160 MB per tab) instead of a fixed page count, cutting the other large share of memory on big documents (#189, thanks ags1234).
• Saved highlights now use the Multiply blend mode, darkening the paper behind the text instead of washing the text out with an opaque rectangle (#200, thanks playerbhr).
• The picker radio's selected dot is centered in its ring (PR #198, thanks Ryokoxx).
• The theme flyout no longer jumps when switching to or from a theme without accent swatches (#199, thanks Ryokoxx).
• Reopening a file restores its last manual zoom level (#201, thanks kilasuelika).
• Resizing split panes in grid view no longer blanks the grid and rebuilds it page by page: the stretched tiles stay visible and get their bitmaps swapped in place.
• Exported images carry the chosen DPI in their metadata instead of always reporting 96, in both the GUI export and the CLI (#188, thanks GruNostalgia).
• Dropping PDFs or images onto the Pages sidebar appends their pages to the open document (#172, thanks 1mk3r).
• Form field text no longer shows a ghost "shadow" copy behind it: the viewer stopped baking field appearances into the page bitmap underneath the live field overlays, thanks Thomas. Print, flatten, export, and thumbnails still include them.
• Rotating a page that was opened with a non-zero /Rotate no longer swaps its MediaBox on save, which permanently clipped the content. Fixed in the vendored PdfSharpCore, whose landscape media-box flip fired on read pages (#184, thanks terada-d).
• Documents opened from Explorer get keyboard focus immediately, so arrows and Page Up/Down work without clicking the window first, and horizontal scrolling from a touchpad or tilt wheel now pans the document (#196, thanks Subjuntivos).
• Double-click text editing now maps PostScript font names (ArialMT, TimesNewRomanPSMT, Helvetica) to the installed Windows family, so edited text keeps its font instead of falling back to the default (#187, thanks fo-bo).
• Machine-wide installs register the killerpdf:// handler for all users, and it now appears in Default apps under link types (#183, thanks adeit).
• Themes are entirely owned by the KillerPDF repository again. The project no longer imports a private sibling KillerUI folder or overlays its resources at runtime, so a standalone clone contains every theme resource it builds and displays.
• Completed the PDF viewer extraction so split panes keep independent documents, tabs, pages, tools, selections, and sidebar positions.
• Various UI and theme consistency tweaks, including clearer Black-theme surfaces and controls, consistent floating-bar borders, legible accent buttons, and balanced film grain across the themes.

KillerPDF v1.7.1

1.7.1 fixes the latest reported crashes, rendering problems, installer registration, file navigation, and editing issues, while adding perspective correction and app-link support.

Added

• Transform can now correct trapezoidal perspective distortion in pages photographed at an angle. Turn on perspective correction, drag four corner handles onto the photographed page outline, and Apply converts that quadrilateral into a straight rectangular page at the full transform resolution. The correction composes with rotation, deskew, scaling, and flipping in the same operation (#175, thanks 1mk3r).
• KillerPDF now registers a killerpdf:// link handler for the current user, laying the app-side foundation for the planned Chrome extension. A killerpdf://open?url=... link can hand a public HTTPS PDF to KillerPDF whether the app is closed or already running; downloads are size-limited and rejected unless their contents begin as a PDF. The registration refreshes itself when the executable moves.
• Open and Save dialogs now return to the last folder successfully used for that kind of operation, unless the caller deliberately supplies another starting folder. The places rail also brings in the user's pinned Windows Explorer Quick Access folders alongside KillerPDF's own editable pins, while avoiding duplicate entries (#178, thanks sheafitzek).

Fixed

• Fit Width and Fit Page are now remembered as the preferred fit for subsequently opened PDFs, so users on smaller screens no longer have to switch from Fit Page every time, thanks Thomas.
• Owner-restricted encrypted PDFs with malformed linearization tables now pass through KillerPDF's tolerant PDFium cleanup instead of being retried through PdfSharp's fragile read-only parser. This fixes the array-index error that prevented the Fritzbox 4060 manual from opening, thanks Thomas.
• Reopening a PDF no longer reapplies a raw zoom saved for a different window or monitor size, which could make the document appear enormous or tiny. KillerPDF keeps the saved page and view mode but fits the document to the current window, with Grid returning to a predictable three-column layout. Perspective correction's corner handles now retain their drag capture across child controls and release reliably, and applying the correction immediately redraws the edited page even when the current zoom does not change.
• Multi-line highlights now follow the reading direction of Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, and other right-to-left text. The first selected line extends left from the starting point and the last line extends right to the ending point, while left-to-right documents keep their existing behavior. Direction is detected per line, so mixed-language pages work without a document-wide setting (#170, thanks playerbhr).
• Installing KillerPDF for everyone now registers its PDF handler for the whole computer instead of writing it into the elevated administrator's personal registry. Every account can now find KillerPDF in Open With and Default apps, with the shared registration pointing at the Program Files copy; each user still chooses their own PDF default (#176, thanks adeit).
• The keyboard-shortcut list now uses the available window width instead of squeezing both halves into a narrow fixed card. Longer translated descriptions have room to remain visible, wrap cleanly on smaller windows, and sit level with the shortcut text in both columns (#177, thanks Mr-Update).
• The mouse wheel now moves the file picker's multi-column list horizontally, so folders and files beyond the right edge can be reached without dragging the bottom scrollbar. The folder tree's wheel works too, scrolling vertically normally and horizontally while Shift is held. The shared picker fix applies to Open, Save, image import, signatures, certificates, and every other file-selection flow; icon and details views keep their normal vertical wheel scrolling.
• Text annotations, highlights, stamps, ink, and filled form fields already stored in a PDF now appear in KillerPDF and survive printing, flattening, image export, page transforms, thumbnails, and repair rasterization (#141, thanks zenfas). PDFium does not paint annotation appearance streams unless explicitly requested, so every pixel-producing path silently omitted them. Enabling Docnet's annotation flag was not safe because it creates and destroys a form-fill environment while its page remains in use, corrupting PDFium state and crashing on a later native call. KillerPDF now renders through its direct PDFium layer, owns the form callback memory for its full native lifetime, paints both ordinary annotations and interactive widget appearances, then immediately closes the form, page, and one-shot document together. The reporter's five-page D&D Beyond file from #179 now exports and flattens with its filled values and multiline fields intact, without the native teardown crash (#179, thanks hsnopi).
• Annotations and stamps now save in the right position on PDFs that already carry a native page rotation when they are first opened (#169, thanks terada-d). The 1.7.0 fix read only KillerPDF's temporary rotation map, but that map is not populated until a page operation performs a temporary save and reload, so annotating an already rotated file and saving it immediately still treated the page as unrotated. Burn-in now falls back to the page's own /Rotate value, every newly opened document clears the previous document's temporary rotation map, and saving removes a malformed CropBox that extends outside its MediaBox instead of preserving contradictory portrait and landscape dimensions. Tests cover the reported invalid page boxes and preservation of a valid inset crop.
• Filled form fields now generate complete appearance streams, including the required stream length, multiline layout, and WinAnsi text encoding (#180, thanks Ryokoxx). This keeps entered values visible and readable in PDF viewers that strictly validate field appearances, resolving the damaged-file warning, missing line breaks, and replaced punctuation reported in #179 (#179, thanks hsnopi).
• Double-clicking bold or italic PDF text to edit it no longer turns the replacement into regular text (#182, thanks fo-bo). PDF text usually carries its face styling inside the embedded font name, such as Helvetica-BoldOblique, rather than as separate bold and italic properties. The detector cleaned those suffixes off to find the font family, then explicitly reset both style flags before opening the editor, so the formatting was lost before the first keystroke. Font detection now separates the family from its bold and italic face, applies both to the live edit box, and carries them into the replacement annotation when it is committed. Focused tests cover subset font names and regular, bold, italic, and combined faces.
• Clicking a page no longer crashes with "'∞' is not a valid value for property 'Height'" (#181, thanks lachlan-00). The page click rebuilds every annotation and form overlay, and malformed geometry could reach a WPF Width or Height property without being checked. WPF refuses NaN and infinity, so one bad form rectangle or a legacy saved signature with zero canvas dimensions took down the whole viewer during the redraw. Form rectangles and every sized annotation are now checked before they reach WPF; invalid form widgets are skipped, old signature dimensions fall back to the standard canvas size, and the render layer has a final guard for malformed persisted annotations.

Changed

• Transform's Rotate, Scale, Flip, Skew, and Perspective sections now collapse like the Stamp dialog, keeping the sidebar compact while still allowing every control to remain in one window. Rotate opens initially and the less frequently used sections stay folded until needed.
• Refined six German labels and shortcut descriptions for more natural and consistent wording (#150, thanks Mr-Update).

KillerPDF v1.7.0

1.7.0 is the split-pane release - two documents side by side in one window - plus the family file dialogs replacing every stock Windows one, a themed system menu, night mode that spares pictures, and two deep text fixes: non-Latin scripts now save correctly, and annotations land where you put them on rotated pages.

Added

• Split pane: F10 shows two documents side by side in one window. Each pane is a card of its own, and the focused one carries an accent ring so it is obvious which pane the toolbar, sidebar and page list are acting on - click either pane to move focus. The boundary between them has a handle on each side: grab the left one to size the left pane, the right one to size the right, and neither pane can be squeezed below a readable width from either direction. F10 again closes the split, and the rail button's icon follows along - a pane pushed out when pressing it will open one, pulled back in when it will close. It is one window, not a second window - each pane has its own tab strip, while the toolbar, sidebar and page list are shared and follow whichever pane has focus. Drag a tab from one pane's strip to the other to move it across, and F10 on a maximized or snapped window splits it evenly instead of squeezing the second pane down to its minimum.
• Every Open and Save dialog is KillerPDF's own now, instead of the stock Windows one: the same themed window as the rest of the app, with a places rail, a folder tree, list/icon/details views, sortable columns, pinnable folders and recent locations. That covers opening and saving PDFs, merging, extracting pages, flatten, image export, image import, signature and certificate picking, OCR output and the zip export - including picking several files at once where that applies. Shared with the other Killer Tools apps, so the file dialog looks and behaves the same across the family.
• Install for everyone on this computer. The Install button on the portable badge now opens a proper confirmation with two choices - add a desktop shortcut (on by default, as before) and install for all users (off by default, since it needs an administrator). An all-users install puts KillerPDF in Program Files with a Start menu entry for every account, and removes the per-user copy so there is a single entry in Add/Remove Programs rather than two. Declining the administrator prompt leaves the app running portable exactly as it was. There is also a /silent switch that performs the machine-wide install with no interface at all, for winget, Chocolatey and RMM deployment. Matches Killendar and KillerShell. Your PDF file association is still registered for you alone, never for other accounts on the machine - the all-users install deliberately does not change what PDFs open with for anyone else.
• "Confirm before opening links" is back, on the About card beside the recent-files toggle. It asks before a link in a PDF opens in your browser, and it is off by default so links stay immediate unless you want the check. The prompt's own "Don't ask again" now simply switches the same option off, so the two can no longer disagree. The setting had no home after the Settings panel was dissolved; About is where the safety and data-hygiene controls live.
• Ctrl+Shift+W closes every tab except the current one, alongside Close Tab on the tab's right-click menu - both now line their keyboard shortcuts up in a real column instead of each item sizing its own.
• Right-clicking the title bar (or Alt+Space) shows a themed system menu that matches the app instead of the stock white Windows one. Same items, same behavior, in all ten languages.

Changed

• Internal: the document view is now a self-contained control rather than part of the main window - the page rendering, zoom, annotations, text editing, crop, forms, links and text selection all moved into it, about 8,700 lines. Every function moved verbatim, verified line by line against the previous version, and no behavior change is intended. This is groundwork for showing two documents side by side in one window.
• The document area is a rounded, lifted card like the rest of the Killer Tools apps, instead of a squared pane running flush into the window edges: rounded corners, an 8px inset on its outer side, and a real drop shadow that falls across the status bar. The sidebar's five-dot gripper is gone, replaced by the family divider - a thin line that lights up in the accent color when you hover or drag it. Full screen still fills the display edge to edge.
• Night mode no longer inverts pictures (#135, thanks dmantisk). Photos and figures keep their real colors while the page around them goes dark - the behavior the request pointed at in Okular. Right-click the moon (or press Shift+N) for "Invert images too" if you want the old full inversion back - useful on scanned documents, where the whole page is one image. Night mode only changes what you see on screen: saving, printing and exporting still produce the document's original colors.
• The Settings panel and its gear are gone: every section moved to where the thing it configures lives, matching the rest of the Killer Tools apps. Theme and language are flyouts on new rail buttons (below the night-mode moon, with a ? button for the shortcuts overlay); the theme flyout stays open across a pick so themes can be compared.
• Toolbar appearance is a right-click menu on the toolbar itself, and it is two independent choices now instead of one list of five: icon size (small/large) and text placement (none/beside/under/text only) - so large icons with captions is finally possible. Fresh installs default to large icons with text underneath; existing installs keep their setting. Ctrl+Shift+1-6 pick the options directly.
• Internal: the codebase has been reorganized into the Killer Tools family layout - document logic in service classes, the About/CLI/OCR/search features behind controllers, the window partials under Shell/. Every moved function is verbatim and no behavior change is intended; the repo root now holds only the entry files.
• New app icon. The old one - the document with the red bar across the bottom - now marks PDF files instead, so a KillerPDF window and a PDF sitting in a folder are no longer the same picture. Explorer caches icons aggressively, so a PDF may keep showing the old art until the cache refreshes.
• View mode is a rail button wearing four view tiles, one per layout: click for a flyout (each mode with its F-key beside it), roll the wheel over it to step through the views, or press F9 to jog from the keyboard - F5-F8 still jump straight to one, and Ctrl+, is retired. All the new shortcuts are on the F1 overlay, in all ten languages.
• Internal: the tab strip and split-pane drag/focus model were rewritten to match KillerShell's implementation, the family's reference for both, replacing the original hand-built version.
• The sidebar's left/right choice sits at the bottom of the sidebar's right-click menu, which now opens from any part of the sidebar; Ctrl+Shift+B flips the side, pairing with Ctrl+B's collapse.
• The content pane's border is a shade lighter in every theme, so the edge between the pane and the chrome reads more clearly - the same value the other Killer Tools apps use.
• The prompt offering to make KillerPDF your default PDF viewer is translated now; it was English-only in every interface language.
• The sidebar's page list fades into the background at its top and bottom edges while there are pages scrolled past them - the same treatment KillerShell's folder tree and the killerpdf.net sidebar use. Each fade ramps in over its own height as a row slides under it, so nothing pops, and neither shows when the list is flush at that end.

Fixed

• Japanese and other non-Latin text no longer saves as empty boxes (#168, thanks terada-d). The editor is a Windows text box, which quietly borrows glyphs from any installed font, so what you type always looks right; the save path resolved a single font and wrote a box for every character that font lacked. Two things were wrong. Nearly every CJK font on Windows ships as a collection file (Yu Gothic, MS Gothic, Meiryo, YaHei, JhengHei), and the save path could not read collections at all - so even picking a Japanese font by hand did not help. And nothing checked whether the chosen font could carry the text. KillerPDF now reads collection fonts, and when your font cannot render something it picks one that can, preferring the same faces Windows itself falls back to. Your own font is always used when it covers the text. This affects Bengali, Korean, Chinese, Thai, Arabic and Indic scripts too, and applies to page numbers and watermarks as well as placed text. Embedded fonts are subset, so a line of Japanese adds tens of KB to the file rather than the whole typeface. In the rare case that nothing installed can draw a character - two different non-Latin scripts in one box, or a script with no font on the PC at all - KillerPDF now says so when the text is placed, listing the characters, instead of leaving it to be discovered after saving and reopening.
• Punctuation shortcuts work on keyboard layouts that need Shift for those characters (#153, thanks Mr-Update). Shortcuts were matched by key position, which is a US-layout assumption: on a German keyboard "?" lives on Shift+ss and "=" on Shift+0, so Ctrl+? and Ctrl+= pressed keys the app was not listening for, and the extra Shift broke the match a second time. Zoom and the shortcuts overlay now respond to the key that TYPES the character, whatever position it occupies, so they work on German, French, Nordic and other layouts rather than being fixed one at a time. The shortcuts overlay also prints the spelling that is right for the keyboard in use instead of always showing the US one.
• Annotations and stamps are no longer burned into the wrong frame on a rotated page (#169, thanks terada-d for a report that diagnosed it down to the line). A page's rotation...

KillerPDF v1.6.6

1.6.6 is primarily a bug fix release - the big one being form fields sitting in the wrong place on non-A4 documents - plus a tool-hotkey remap, a new Remove Password command, more menu polish, and other small keyboard and UI improvements.

Added

• Remove Password in the Save dropdown (#149, thanks dmantisk): saves the open document back over the original with its password protection dropped - available whenever the file needed a password (or carried owner restrictions) to open. KillerPDF already strips encryption at open time because the editing pipeline cannot modify encrypted files in place, so every save has always written an unprotected PDF; this makes that behavior a visible, deliberate action, and regular saves of a previously protected file now say so in the status bar instead of dropping the password silently. In all ten languages.

Changed

• Tool hotkey remap - the digits again mirror the toolbar left to right, with Shapes slotted in (breaks some muscle memory; the letter keys are unchanged): V = Select (the Photoshop / Illustrator / Figma convention; its old digit went to Text), 1 = Text, 2 = Highlight, 3 = Line, 4 = Shapes, 5 = Draw, 6 = Image, 7 = Signature, 8 = Crop, 9 = Transform, 0 = Stamp. The toolbar buttons reorder to match (Highlight now before Line, Shapes between Line and Draw), and the Shapes tool has a keyboard shortcut for the first time. The shortcuts overlay (both views), tooltips, and the help page follow.
• Invert document colors moved from Ctrl+I to the bare N key (night mode), freeing the conventional italic chord: Ctrl+B / Ctrl+I / Ctrl+U now toggle Bold / Italic / Underline while typing in a text box, matching the text bar's B/I/U buttons. Listed in the shortcuts overlay in all ten languages.
• Esc now steps down instead of straight out: with nothing left to cancel it first returns to the Select tool, Acrobat-style, and only a second Esc exits the app as before. And the Highlight tools' hint on a page with no text layer now points at the deliberate rectangle path - "No text here - Shapes is on 4" - in all ten languages.
• The right-click menus caught up with 1.6.5's menu polish: every item in the page, annotation, sidebar-thumbnail, and background context menus now carries its icon in the left gutter, matching the toolbar's glyph for the same action - and page rotation gets a proper mirrored CW / CCW pair.
• The page sidebar now starts collapsed when no PDF is open and opens itself when one is - an empty workspace has no thumbnails to show - and re-collapses when the last document closes. The empty page-number box and "/ –" that used to sit in the sidebar header on an empty workspace are hidden until a document is open.

Fixed

• Interactive form-field overlays sat in the wrong place on any document that is not A4-sized - shifted down and slightly wide, worst near the top of the page, while the page itself (and every other viewer) drew the fields correctly. PdfSharpCore's page.Width getter, which the link layer touches on every render, silently converts the parsed /MediaBox array into its internal rectangle type; the field parser's array read then came up empty and fell back to a hardcoded A4 page size, so only A4 documents lined up. The field parser now reads both representations and walks the page-tree inheritance chain for /MediaBox and /CropBox. Found through the brochure: the shipped copy is A4, so the bug was invisible until a US Letter rebuild put every field about 40 points adrift.
• The Document Info shortcut label showed mojibake in Spanish, Bengali, and both Chinese interfaces - the same double-encoding repaired for Japanese in 1.6.5 (#136). All four now render their real text.
• Exported JPEGs no longer come out as black pages, and exported PNGs no longer carry a transparent background (#148, thanks Ryokoxx). PDFium leaves unpainted background pixels fully transparent; the JPEG encoder dropped that alpha channel and kept the zeroed color underneath, so any page without an explicit background - most PDFs - rendered solid black through --to-image --format jpg and the new Export pages as images dialog. Exports now composite over white by default, which also keeps the needless full-page alpha channel out of flattened PDFs (--flatten and Save Flattened). A new --transparent flag on --to-image keeps the raw alpha for PNG output when transparency is actually wanted.
• The Password Required prompt for opening a protected PDF is now a themed dialog like the rest of the app - wordmark title bar, dark card with film grain, a themed password field, and Open / Cancel buttons - instead of the stock white Windows dialog with native chrome it used to be.

KillerPDF v1.6.5

Added

• Shapes tool: rectangle, ellipse, and free-form polygon markers, each with an optional fill. Box keeps the classic drag-a-filled-rectangle gesture the highlighter used to have; ellipse and polygon are closed outlines that move, resize, flatten, and print like any other drawing. Freeform places points click by click - click the first point (its target lights up when you are close) or double-click to close, Esc cancels, Backspace removes the last point. The tool shares the draw bar's color, size, and opacity, with a mini-shape sub-mode picker and a Fill toggle.
• Export pages as images (#132, thanks KaneLeung): a new entry in the Save dropdown renders pages to PNG or JPEG files at a chosen DPI (24-1200, default 150) with an optional page range, through the same pipeline as the CLI's --to-image. Pending annotations and stamps are burned in, in-app rotations are honored, and files land as <name>-page-001.png next to the base name you pick.
• Odd/even page printing (#134, thanks superaustingao): a new selector in the print dialog under Pages - All pages, Odd pages only, Even pages only - applied on top of the page range, with the preview following along. Print the odds, flip the stack, print the evens: manual duplex for printers without a duplexer, the Word way.
• Invert document colors (#135, thanks dmantisk): a moon toggle at the bottom of the sidebar rail (or Ctrl+I) renders the document with inverted colors for dark-mode reading - the icon lights in the accent while active, and the choice is remembered across launches. Display only: saving, printing, exporting, OCR, and the sidebar thumbnails all keep the document's true colors.
• App-wide size control for accessibility, the KillerNotes way: the title bar now shows the app icon next to the wordmark, and scrolling the mouse wheel over that logo scales the app chrome - toolbar, sidebar, and tab strip - in fine steps from 70% to 250% (or Ctrl+Shift and the +/- keys, Ctrl+Shift+0 to reset), remembered across launches. The document pane is deliberately untouched: app size and page zoom stay separate controls, so scaling the chrome never changes what the page looks like. It uses a layout scale so UI text stays sharp, and the title bar and footer stay fixed so the logo never moves out from under the cursor.
• Recent-files privacy controls (#146, thanks Bolle1987): a Clear list link on the start screen's Recent panel (matching the one already in the Open dropdown), and a "Don't remember recently opened files" toggle in the About window next to Clear all Data, where the data-hygiene controls live - turning it on also empties the existing list, so nothing about your documents persists on a shared machine. Translated into all ten languages.
• Czech (cs-CZ) localization (#138, thanks jiri-ops): the tenth interface language, a full translation following Czech Windows/Adobe conventions, in the language picker as "Čeština" - with Czech ("ces") joining the OCR language catalog, downloadable on demand like the rest.

Fixed

• Page numbers and watermarks are now actually written into the saved PDF when they are the document's only markup (#147, thanks Mr-Update). Every save path only burned the stamp layer when the document also carried at least one annotation, so stamping a clean document - the whole point of the tool on a fresh file - produced a PDF with nothing on it.
• Stamps can be removed again (#145, thanks Mr-Update). Unchecking both Page Numbers and Watermark disabled the Apply button, so once a document had stamps there was no way to turn them off - applying with both sections off is exactly how they are cleared, and is now allowed whenever the document already has stamps.
• Crash opening the Stamp or Transform tool (and on save) on a page with a multi-line text annotation (#142, thanks TrNguyen20; root cause and fix from Ryokoxx in #144). The burn silently used justified alignment, whose draw path dereferenced the empty line-break blocks a newline produces - any font, any machine. Burned text is now explicitly left-aligned, finally matching the editor once a line wraps, and the vendored formatter skips line-break blocks (and no longer flings blocks off the page on single-word justified lines). As a separate net for genuine font failures - the typeface behind a text box resolves lazily, so a font that constructed fine can still fail at first draw on machines missing that face - the draw falls back to the stock font, then skips just that annotation, and a failed preview burn renders the page without its annotation layer instead of taking the app down.
• The pre-save signature scrub tripped a NullReferenceException on every save of a document with no form fields (a fresh blank document, most PDFs without forms) - swallowed silently in release builds, but it aborted the scrub early and broke into any attached debugger. Absent dictionary entries like a missing /AcroForm are now treated as "not there" instead of dereferenced.
• Bookmarks that point at named destinations now resolve (#143, thanks Ryokoxx). PDFs from HTML-to-PDF generators (wkhtmltopdf underneath most invoice and statement tools) write outline destinations as names looked up through the catalog, which the outline loader did not handle - Debug builds popped an assertion dialog and Release builds left the bookmark silently dead. Resolution now falls back to the same name-tree walker the link layer already uses.
• The sidebar page thumbnails, outline tooltips, and grid-view tooltips always said English "Page N" regardless of the interface language (#137, thanks jiri-ops) - the labels are now real localized strings in every language, and they update immediately on a language switch.
• Japanese: repaired a garbled Document Info shortcut label (mojibake) and tightened the About wording (#136, thanks coolvitto).
• Fresh clones build again without manual repair: an explicit .gitattributes rule keeps EOL normalization away from the vendored third_party sources (#140, thanks Ryokoxx), belt and braces on top of the earlier re-encode.
• The Shapes tool strings and the outline's "(untitled)" placeholder existed only in English and Czech - the other eight languages showed blank tooltips and labels there. All ten languages now carry the full string set, verified key-for-key against English.

Changed

• Text selection now flows with the text (#127, thanks Ryokoxx): dragging with the Select tool tracks the actual run of characters in reading order, browser-style - across lines, paragraphs, and (in continuous view) across pages. A plain click still selects annotations, and drags that start on empty page keep the classic box select, so scans and annotation multi-select behave as before. Ctrl+A now shows real per-line selection on the page.
• Highlight, Strikethrough, and Underline follow the text the same way: drag over words and the markup hugs each line instead of laying down one rectangle. One gesture produces one grouped annotation per page - it selects, moves, deletes, and undoes as a single unit. On pages with no text layer the tools show a status hint instead of silently drawing a box; the highlight eraser keeps its rectangle.
• Black theme: the on-page selection color was a stray royal blue; it is now a readable dark green matching the theme.
• The form-field font-size stepper is now an "inline flyout" - a new style for controls that float on the document itself: a translucent rounded pill that drips down from the field being typed in, follows it through scrolling and zoom, flips above it at the bottom of the pane, and solidifies on hover. Subtle enough to sit on a legal document without being in the way, and it can no longer collide with the draw/text bars or the toolbar.
• Menu polish: dropdown items can carry icons in the gutter the check column always reserved (Save, Open, and OCR menus got them), and the OCR "Use High Quality Models" toggle now keeps the menu open, refreshing its checkmark and the per-language "(download)" labels in place.
• Tooltips now show their keyboard shortcut everywhere one exists, in all ten languages: the whole tool palette carries its single-key hint (V select, T text, H highlight, D draw, L line, I image, G signature, C crop, R transform, S stamp), and the invert and app-size controls show Ctrl+I and Ctrl+Shift+=/-/0. The shortcuts overlay's list view also caught up with the keyboard view: Ctrl+Shift+Z (redo), Ctrl+Shift+Tab (previous tab), and F2 (rename bookmark) are listed now.
• Collapsing and expanding the sidebar is now a smooth slide instead of a snap: the panel glides shut over a quarter second with the thumbnails holding their size (clipped, not squished), and the document settles in a single crisp pass afterwards - the same pipeline a splitter drag uses.

KillerPDF v1.6.4

KillerPDF 1.6.4 adds a full command-line interface, in-app bookmark editing, redo and jump history, and a visual keyboard view for shortcuts. It also introduces a standards-conformance guarantee: every release is now validated against veraPDF across a 2,900-file corpus, so saving a PDF never degrades it.

Added

• Command-line interface: --merge, --extract-pages, --split, --decrypt, --to-image, --flatten, --print, --ocr, plus --batch-resave. Runs headless with real exit codes, works while the app is open, and reuses the exact pipelines the GUI runs.
• Bookmark editing in the sidebar Outline panel: add, rename in place (F2), nest, reorder, retarget, delete, with multi-select and full undo (#133, thanks @alivio-israu).
• Redo: Ctrl+Y or Ctrl+Shift+Z, across annotations, text edits, stamps, and document operations, per tab.
• Jump history: Alt+Left / Alt+Right and the mouse back/forward buttons retrace bookmark, link, and page jumps, browser-style.
• Keyboard view in the shortcuts overlay (F1): a visual keyboard with every bound key lit and color-coded by category, following the active theme and language.
• More big-viewer conventions: Home/End jump to first/last page, Ctrl+1/2/3 set actual size / fit width / fit page, and the Menu key opens the context menu at the selection.
• Japanese OCR language, on-demand like the rest.

Changed

• Shortcut remap: About is now F12, Document Info is F4 (Ctrl+D also works), F2 renames the selected bookmark, Settings gained F9, and F3 / Shift+F3 step search matches from anywhere.
• Clicking a page in Continuous view no longer snap-scrolls it to the top: clicks are for tools and selection, and the current page follows the viewport (#128, thanks @Ryokoxx).
• German translation refinements (thanks @Mr-Update, #124, #126).

Fixed

• Saving no longer degrades PDF/A conformance. The write engine (PdfSharpCore) is now vendored and patched with six standards fixes, verified by a new veraPDF harness across a 2,900-file corpus. See validation/RESULTS.md.
• Fixed an intermittent crash while scrolling or clicking through a document: direct PDFium calls could collide with a background render inside the (single-threaded) engine. All direct calls now serialize on the same lock the renderer uses.
• Saving a signed PDF now strips the dead signature value instead of shipping one that fails strict validation.
• Saving over the open file no longer fails with "being used by another process" on annotation-only PDFs (#129, thanks @Peter5164).
• Fixed a crash opening a PDF whose page tree parses to zero pages (#130, thanks @demo1866).
• Bookmark titles in password-protected PDFs no longer show as mojibake (#133, thanks @alivio-israu).
• Grid view now tracks the current page while scrolling.

Security

• SixLabors.ImageSharp updated 1.0.4 to 2.1.13, clearing seven published advisories in image parsing (import, clipboard paste, signature images).

Verify

• KillerPDF.exe is Authenticode-signed (Open Source Developer Stephen Riley).
• SHA256 (exe): 9F64C3F4791347860D4010257792902063E2F4646607B278D59C654A58EC9A63
• Full hashes in SHA256SUMS.txt.

Full changelog: CHANGELOG.md

KillerPDF v1.6.3

A bugfix release for the 1.6 line. Highlights: memory use on large documents is dramatically lower, and two save corruption bugs (crop boxes and bookmarks) are fixed for good, including healing files damaged by earlier 1.6.x builds.

Changed

• Links open directly again: the confirm-before-opening prompt and its Settings row are off for now.
• When both document scrollbars are visible, the vertical bar now runs the full pane height and owns the corner.
• Grid view packs pages edge to edge with a hairline separator, so more of the window shows actual pages.
• Two-Page mode: Fit Page now leaves even margins above and below the spread.

Fixed

• Saving any PDF whose pages had no crop box silently planted a zero-size /CropBox on every page, which Adobe rejects with a "page dimensions out-of-range" error - the real reason merged Google Docs exports failed in Acrobat but opened in Chrome. Every save now strips degenerate crop boxes, so re-saving a file damaged by 1.6.x heals it (thanks Richard Lam).
• Saving any PDF that has no bookmarks silently corrupted the file's structure (a dangling /Outlines reference). Strict viewers refused the file with a repair prompt, and the repair stripped fillable forms. Saves are now clean, and the repair path first tries a lossless PDFium re-save that preserves forms and bookmarks, so files damaged by older builds recover intact (#103, thanks Peter5164).
• High memory use on large documents (#122, thanks RoyYang567): the page-bitmap cache is capped to a window around the viewport, closing a tab returns memory to the OS, and Continuous view only holds bitmaps for pages near the viewport - a 243-page image-heavy PDF now costs a few hundred MB instead of climbing past 7 GB.
• Switching from Grid to Continuous view kept the grid's scrollbar overrides, clipping zoomed pages with no horizontal scrollbar.
• Closing with unsaved changes stacked two prompts; confirming "close without saving" now counts as the quit confirmation, and it defaults to No so a stray Enter can't discard work.
• The quit prompt no longer appears when no documents are open.
• Two-Page mode: arrow keys, PgUp/PgDn, and the wheel's edge page-flip now move one spread at a time (#120, thanks eddardburger).
• Selection boxes could get stranded on screen until restart; they are now removed properly and swept on file close (#121, thanks TaBnLd).

Checksums

KillerPDF.exe SHA256: 5165E4D5F7002B29791A7F392C191936ABE2DB4C02F21F8037DBE35BF187D2FE

Full changelog: CHANGELOG.md