PDF editor and manager for Windows, macOS and Linux — fast, offline and subscription-free.
Most PDF tools are either paid, browser-based, or require uploading your files to the cloud. PDFApps is different:
- 100% offline — your files never leave your computer
- No subscriptions — free and open source, forever
- All-in-one — split, merge, compress, encrypt, OCR, convert, edit and more in a single app
- Cross-platform — works on Windows, macOS and Linux
- Fast — lazy rendering opens large PDFs instantly
Integrated PDF viewer with continuous scroll and lazy rendering
Visual PDF editor — redact, insert text, images, highlights and notes
All-in-one PDF tools — split, merge, compress, encrypt, OCR and more
Light theme support
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
| Split | Split the PDF into multiple files by user-defined page ranges |
| Merge | Combine multiple PDFs (drag and drop) into a single output, with free ordering |
| Rotate | Rotate individual pages or the entire document at any angle |
| Extract pages | Export a subset of pages to a new PDF |
| Reorder | Drag-and-drop interface to reorder or remove pages with preview |
| Compress | Reduce file size with three compression levels (extreme / recommended / low) |
| Encrypt | Protect the PDF with a password or remove existing protection |
| Watermark | Overlay a watermark/stamp PDF on pages with opacity and position control |
| OCR | Recognise text in scanned PDFs — supports PT, EN, ES, FR and DE |
| Convert | Convert PDF to images (PNG/JPG with DPI control), Word (DOCX) or plain text (TXT) |
| Edit | Inline visual editor: redact, insert text, image, highlight, notes, forms and edit existing text |
| Info | Show metadata, page count, size and document properties |
- Continuous scroll through all pages (Adobe Acrobat style)
- Lazy rendering — opens instantly; pages rendered in background as they are viewed
- Zoom with Ctrl+scroll or zoom buttons
- Text selection and copy by dragging
- Password-protected PDF support
- Drag & drop file support
- Modern dark/light theme with collapsible sidebar
- Full drag and drop support across all file fields
- Cross-platform: Windows, macOS and Linux
- Installer with automatic OCR engine (Tesseract) detection and installation — Windows
| Platform | How to get it |
|---|---|
| Windows 10/11 64-bit | Download PDFAppsSetup.exe from Releases |
| macOS 10.14+ | Build from source (see below) — Tesseract via brew install tesseract tesseract-lang |
| Linux | Build from source (see below) — Tesseract via sudo apt install tesseract-ocr |
# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/nelsonduarte/PDFApps-en.git
cd PDFApps-en
# Create virtual environment
python -m venv venv
# Activate — Windows
venv\Scripts\activate
# Activate — macOS / Linux
source venv/bin/activate
# Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt
# Run
python pdfapps.pyTesseract OCR is required for text recognition:
- Windows: the installer handles this automatically
- macOS:
brew install tesseract tesseract-lang- Linux:
sudo apt install tesseract-ocr tesseract-ocr-por tesseract-ocr-eng
The build process generates three executables in the dist/ folder:
# 1. Main application
python -m PyInstaller --noconfirm pdfapps.spec
# 2. Uninstaller
python -m PyInstaller --noconfirm uninstaller.spec
# 3. Installer (bundles the two above)
python -m PyInstaller --noconfirm installer.spec| File | Description |
|---|---|
dist/PDFApps.exe |
Main application (~78 MB) |
dist/PDFAppsUninstall.exe |
Standalone uninstaller (~11 MB) |
dist/PDFAppsSetup.exe |
Installer for distribution (~99 MB) |
PyInstaller does not cross-compile — the binary must be built on the target platform.
| Component | Technology | Version |
|---|---|---|
| GUI | PySide6 (Qt 6) | 6.10.2 |
| PDF rendering | PyMuPDF (fitz) | 1.27.2 |
| PDF manipulation | pypdf | 6.8.0 |
| OCR | Tesseract + pytesseract | 0.3.13 |
| DOCX export | python-docx | 1.2.0 |
| Image processing | Pillow | 12.1.1 |
| Icons | QtAwesome | 1.4.1 |
| Packaging | PyInstaller | 6.19.0 |
PDFApps/
├── pdfapps.py # Application entry point
├── installer.py # Installer (tkinter UI)
├── uninstaller.py # Uninstaller
├── pdfapps.spec # PyInstaller config — app
├── installer.spec # PyInstaller config — installer
├── uninstaller.spec # PyInstaller config — uninstaller
├── icon.ico # Application icon
├── requirements.txt # Python dependencies
├── app/ # Modular source code
│ ├── constants.py # Colours and design constants
│ ├── styles.py # Qt stylesheet (dark/light theme)
│ ├── utils.py # Shared utilities
│ ├── widgets.py # Reusable widgets (DropFileEdit, etc.)
│ ├── base.py # Base class for tools (BasePage)
│ ├── window.py # Main window (MainWindow)
│ ├── tools/ # PDF manipulation tools
│ │ ├── split.py
│ │ ├── merge.py
│ │ ├── rotate.py
│ │ ├── extract.py
│ │ ├── reorder.py
│ │ ├── compress.py
│ │ ├── encrypt.py
│ │ ├── watermark.py
│ │ ├── convert.py
│ │ ├── info.py
│ │ └── ocr.py
│ ├── viewer/ # Integrated PDF viewer
│ │ ├── canvas.py # Lazy page rendering in background threads (fitz)
│ │ └── panel.py # Viewer panel with controls
│ └── editor/ # Visual PDF editor
│ ├── canvas.py # Edit canvas (PdfEditCanvas)
│ ├── tab.py # Edit tab (TabEditar)
│ └── dialogs.py # Auxiliary dialogs
└── dist/ # Generated executables (after build)
Contributions are welcome! Feel free to open issues or submit pull requests.
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This project is licensed under the MIT License.