PDFedits v0.5.0 Release

Changelog

All notable changes to PDFedits are documented here. Format follows Keep a Changelog, and versions follow Semantic Versioning (MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH) — during v1, expect 0.1.x patch releases for fixes and small additions, with 0.x.0 reserved for larger feature drops.

[0.5.0] — 2026-08-19

Multiple open documents, recent documents, and printing — the last items from the original feature request — plus a CLAUDE.md project guide for future agentic sessions (Claude Code/Cowork) working on this codebase.

Added

• CLAUDE.md — architecture overview, the overlay-based-editing rationale, the coordinate system, file-by-file responsibilities, conventions (undo/redo, the double-stopPropagation click pattern, the "verify pdf-lib assumptions with a live Node script" habit), and known gaps. Read this first if you're an agent picking up this repo.
• Multiple open documents — a tab bar under the header. Opening a PDF while one is already open creates a new tab rather than replacing it; each tab keeps its own elements, undo/redo history, zoom, and view mode independently. Implemented as a "snapshot on switch" model — the active tab's live state is the source of truth; switching tabs snapshots it into a lightweight record and reloads the target tab's record — rather than keeping every tab's pdf.js document loaded simultaneously, to keep memory use reasonable with several tabs open.
• Recent documents — the last 15 opened PDFs/projects, shown on the empty-state screen, stored in a small JSON file in the app's own data directory (not visible-file-picker history — see below for why). Handles the file having moved or been deleted gracefully: offers to remove it from the list rather than failing silently.
• Printing — no custom print pipeline. Exports current edits to a temp PDF and opens it with the OS's default PDF viewer, so page range/copies/printer selection all come from a viewer that already does this well. Uses the new @tauri-apps/plugin-shell dependency (shell:allow-open permission, scoped to opening — not arbitrary command execution).

Notes

• Recent documents storage was chosen over relying on OS-level "recent files" integration (e.g. Windows Jump Lists, macOS recent items) because that requires deeper per-platform native integration than the current Tauri setup does — this is a simpler, cross-platform, in-app equivalent. Might be worth revisiting for closer OS integration later.
• Switching away from a tab does not keep its pdf.js document instance loaded — reopening it re-parses from the stored bytes. This trades a small perf cost on tab-switch for materially lower memory use with multiple tabs open, which seemed like the right tradeoff for a desktop app.

[0.4.1] — 2026-08-18

Continuous scroll and freehand drawing — the two items deliberately held back from 0.4.0 for being architecturally bigger and riskier than everything else on the list. Both are additive: single-page mode is still the default and works exactly as before.

Added

• Continuous scroll — a new view-mode toggle in the tools bar switches between single-page view (default) and a scrollable stack of every page. Pages lazily render as they scroll near the viewport (via IntersectionObserver, ~800px look-ahead) rather than all rendering at once, so this stays reasonable on longer documents. Navigation — Pages panel clicks, go-to-page, First/Last, search results — all scroll the target page into view in continuous mode.
• Freehand pencil drawing — click-drag to draw; strokes are selectable, movable, resizable (the whole stroke scales with its bounding box), and colorable/adjustable-thickness from the Properties panel, same as every other element.

Scoping notes (read before relying on these)

• Continuous scroll does not auto-update "current page" as you scroll. This was a deliberate choice: wiring scroll position back to currentPage needs IntersectionObserver-based tracking with real feedback-loop risk against the "scroll to page on navigation" behavior, for a feature whose main value (seeing many pages at once) doesn't actually depend on that tracking. The Pages panel won't highlight the page you're currently looking at while free-scrolling — only explicit navigation updates it. May revisit if this turns out to matter more than expected.
• Fit Page zoom mode falls back to Fit Width's math in continuous mode — "fit the current page to the viewport height" doesn't have a clean meaning when several pages are visible in a column at once.
• Very long documents (hundreds of pages) haven't been performance-tested against continuous mode — the lazy-render approach should hold up reasonably, but this wasn't validated against a large real-world PDF.