PDFedits v0.5.4 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.

[0.5.4] — 2026-08-26

Critical fix: Save, Save As, Print, Add Page, and Insert PDF were all broken, throwing "No PDF header found" or "pdfBase64 is missing" errors.

Fixed

• Root cause: pdf.js was silently corrupting the app's own copy of the PDF's bytes. loadPdfDocument() (used every time a PDF is opened, a tab is switched to, or a page-management operation reloads the document) handed the app's Uint8Array directly to pdfjsLib.getDocument(). pdf.js transfers that array's underlying buffer to its rendering worker for performance — confirmed directly in its source (sendWithPromise("GetDocRequest", docParams, [data.buffer])) — which detaches the buffer in the main thread. Since the app kept that exact same object in state (pdfBytes) and reused it for every later Save/Print/page-management action, the very first render of any document silently zeroed out the bytes needed for everything after it. pdf-lib then failed to find a PDF header because, by the time it looked, there was nothing there.
• This explains every symptom reported together: Save/Save As/Print (flattenToPdf re-parses pdfBytes), Add Page and Insert PDF (addBlankPageToPdf/insertPdfPages re-parse pdfBytes), and the "Open project" failure — a project saved after the corruption had already happened would embed an empty/broken pdfBase64, so reopening it correctly reported the field as missing. All five were one bug, not five.
• Fix: loadPdfDocument() now hands pdf.js a disposable copy (bytes.slice()) instead of the original array, so the app's stored copy is never touched by pdf.js's worker transfer. This is the single, sole place getDocument() is called from — one fix covers every affected code path.

If you saved a project file while on an affected version

Any .pdfedits file saved between 0.5.0 and 0.5.3 may have an empty/corrupted embedded PDF and will fail to reopen with "pdfBase64 is missing." There's no way to recover the PDF from an already-corrupted project file — reopen the original PDF and redo the edits, then re-save the project on 0.5.4 or later.