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PDFedits v0.5.2 Release

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@dotabdullah dotabdullah released this 24 Aug 22:02
· 13 commits to main since this release
0.5.2
20367e5

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.

[0.5.2] — 2026-08-22

Fixes Save, Save As, and Print appearing to do nothing when clicked.

Fixed

  • Save / Save As / Print silently failing. Root cause was two-fold:
    1. In all three handlers, the step that actually builds the exported PDF bytes was called outside its try/catch block. If that step threw for any reason, the error was silently swallowed — no dialog, no console-visible feedback from the user's perspective, the button just appeared dead. All three (plus PNG/JPG export, which had the same pattern) now wrap the entire operation in a single try/catch, so any failure now shows an actual error message instead of doing nothing.
    2. The thing actually throwing: any text containing characters outside WinAnsi encoding — Arabic/Urdu script, most emoji, several typographic symbols — crashes pdf-lib's standard-font text drawing outright. This is a near-certain real-world case, not an edge case, for anyone typing non-Latin text into a text box or note. Export now substitutes unsupported characters with ? instead of failing the whole export, and shows a clear one-time note afterward telling you that happened (rather than silently mangling your text with no explanation). Verified with a live Node.js reproduction of the exact failure before and after the fix — the "before" case reliably threw WinAnsi cannot encode "ا" (0x0627).

Known limitation (unchanged, now surfaced honestly instead of crashing)

Non-Latin scripts (Arabic, Urdu, and similar) still aren't genuinely supported in exported PDF text — proper rendering needs both a font with those glyphs and right-to-left text shaping (correctly joining/reordering letters), which pdf-lib's basic text drawing doesn't do. Full support is a real feature, not a quick fix; this release stops it from crashing the export and makes the limitation visible instead of silent. See the README's new "On non-Latin text" note.

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