A lightweight, private, open-source desktop PDF editor with no subscriptions, cloud uploads, telemetry, or paywalls.

Website · Downloads · Report an issue

VerityPDF is a cross-platform PDF editor for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Documents are opened, rendered, edited, and exported entirely on your device. The application makes no background network requests and contains no analytics, advertising, cloud processing, account system, or paid features. It contacts GitHub only when you explicitly choose Check for updates.

Highlights

• Private by design: documents never leave the local filesystem.
• Small native application: built with Tauri and the operating system's web renderer instead of bundling Chromium.
• Free and open source: licensed under the GNU AGPL version 3.
• Cross-platform: native installers for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
• Offline-first: editing and export do not require an internet connection.

Features

PDF viewing

• Continuous page scrolling
• High-DPI PDF.js rendering
• Page thumbnail navigation
• Nested PDF bookmark navigation with expandable outline sections
• Zoom slider and zoom controls
• Fit-to-width and fit-to-page modes
• Native and browser-preview file pickers
• Drag-and-drop document opening
• Password prompts with local retry support for encrypted PDFs; passwords stay in memory and encrypted files open in protected viewing mode
• Virtualized page mounting for large documents
• Skeleton placeholders and cached page imagery while sharper zoom levels render
• A persistent status bar for page number, dimensions, file size, zoom, background work, and saved state

Page editing

• Drag-and-drop page reordering
• Ctrl/Command-click and Shift-click multi-page selection
• Group page reordering by dragging a selected thumbnail
• Rotate, delete, duplicate, or extract selected pages as one history action
• Staged multi-document merge with ordering, page previews, removal, page counts, and estimated output size
• Split or extract selected page ranges
• Undo and redo edit history

Markup and privacy tools

• Selectable, movable, resizable, and editable text annotations
• Selectable freehand pen and highlighter strokes
• Image and signature overlays
• Selectable and resizable redaction regions
• Flattened annotations during export
• Secure redaction export through local page rasterization

Document tools

• Save and Save As
• Native system printing with page ranges, portrait or landscape layout, and Ctrl/Command+P
• Crash-safe saving through same-folder temporary files and atomic replacement
• Pre-save export review covering annotations, secure redaction, forms, metadata, and estimated output size
• Save / Discard / Cancel protection when closing with unsaved changes
• Up to five local crash-recovery revisions per document window, with stale detection, restore, and deletion controls in Preferences
• Default-on local session restoration for the previous document, page, scroll position, zoom, sidebar, and selected tool
• Interactive form-field flattening
• Metadata sanitization
• PDF structure optimization

Interface

The application uses a responsive desktop ribbon with separate Page Edit, History, Rotate, Markup, Document, and View sections. Open a PDF to activate the editing tools, then select pages from the resizable thumbnail sidebar. Selecting an annotation opens a resizable properties panel. Dark, light, and operating-system themes are supported, and workspace dimensions, zoom, and fit mode are remembered locally. The empty workspace provides drag-and-drop, Open, and recent-document entry points.

Session restoration is enabled by default because all remembered state remains on the local computer. It can be disabled from Preferences, which immediately forgets the stored session.

Keyboard shortcuts

The searchable shortcut reference is also available from the application header.

Install

Download the installer for your operating system from the latest GitHub release:

The project is still in early development. Unsigned preview builds may trigger Windows SmartScreen or macOS Gatekeeper warnings.

Development

Prerequisites

• Node.js 20 or later
• Rust stable with the MSVC toolchain on Windows
• The platform prerequisites listed in the Tauri documentation

On Windows, Tauri also requires Microsoft C++ Build Tools with the Desktop development with C++ workload. WebView2 is included with current versions of Windows.

Run the browser preview

npm install
npm run dev

Open http://localhost:1420. Native filesystem dialogs are replaced by browser file inputs in this preview.

Run the native desktop application

npm install
npm run tauri dev

Build native installers

npm run tauri build

Build output is written to:

src-tauri/target/release/bundle/

Check release download counts

Maintainers can view GitHub release-asset totals grouped by operating system:

npm run downloads

This command contacts GitHub only when invoked. It is not included in the desktop application and does not collect user telemetry. The reported values are downloads rather than unique users or confirmed installations.

Release automation

The workflow in .github/workflows/release.yml builds native packages on Windows, macOS, and Linux whenever a version tag is pushed:

git tag v0.1.0
git push origin v0.1.0

The workflow creates a draft GitHub Release containing:

• Windows NSIS and MSI installers
• A macOS DMG
• Linux DEB and AppImage packages
• Microsoft Store x64 and ARM64 MSIX workflow artifacts
• A SHA256SUMS.txt manifest covering every installer
• An SPDX JSON software bill of materials (SBOM)
• GitHub provenance and SBOM attestations for the stable installer assets

The workflow verifies all expected assets and publishes the release only after every platform build and checksum step succeeds. Verify a downloaded installer with sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS.txt on Linux, shasum -a 256 on macOS, or Get-FileHash -Algorithm SHA256 on Windows.

The pre-release checks also audit npm and Rust vulnerabilities, enforce the Rust dependency/license policy, exercise the installers, and run accessibility and performance budgets. See docs/QUALITY_ASSURANCE.md for the coverage and local commands.

Microsoft Store identity, packaging, listing copy, artwork, screenshots, and submission checks are documented in docs/MICROSOFT_STORE.md and docs/STORE_LISTING.md.

Architecture

Editor commands use immutable document snapshots so page operations and annotations participate in the same undo/redo history. PDF.js renders local bytes into the viewport, while pdf-lib performs structural changes and export.

Privacy and security

VerityPDF is designed to process documents without transmitting them:

• No background HTTP requests are made. The only in-app request occurs when the user explicitly chooses Check for updates, and it retrieves public release metadata from GitHub without document or diagnostic data.
• No telemetry or crash analytics are included.
• No advertising or user tracking is included.
• No account or cloud synchronization exists.
• The production content security policy restricts external connections.
• The Report Issue action opens the public GitHub issue form in the system browser only after an explicit click. It does not upload documents, diagnostics, file names, or paths.

Dependency installation and update checks performed by development tools are separate from the installed application's document-processing behavior.

See the full VerityPDF Privacy Policy for details about local document access, recovery storage, user controls, and third-party distribution services.

OCR policy

OCR is bundled as a completely local component. After text extraction finishes, pages without usable embedded text are recognized asynchronously in the background. Search uses the recognized text as it becomes available. The OCR engine, English language data, and SIMD-compatible WebAssembly assets ship with the application and never fall back to a network download.

Current limitations

• Annotations use a deliberately small initial toolset.
• Secure redaction rasterizes pages, which removes searchable text from the exported document.
• Interactive form creation and editing are not yet implemented.
• Bookmark creation, renaming, and deletion are not yet implemented; existing PDF outlines can be browsed and used for navigation.
• Bundled OCR currently recognizes English text; additional offline language packs are not yet included.
• Release builds are not currently code-signed or notarized.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please open an issue before beginning a large feature or architectural change. All contributed functionality must preserve the offline-first privacy model and use license-compatible dependencies.

Users can open the issue form from Preferences or from an application error. Error details are copied to the clipboard only on request so they can be reviewed before being included in a public report.

Participation in the project is governed by the Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct.

License

VerityPDF is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3. The GitHub repository contains the full license text.