PDF Panda

The friendly, fast, cross-platform PDF editor.
Open a document, rearrange pages, annotate, sign, and export to Markdown - all in one lightweight native app.

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Screenshots

Welcome screen - custom title bar, menu bar, and click-to-open splash before a document is loaded.

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What is PDF Panda?

PDF Panda is a desktop PDF editor for the everyday workflow: view, reorganize, annotate, sign, and export - without firing up a heavyweight suite or uploading your files to someone else's server. It's a small, snappy native app that gets out of your way.

Three things we care about:

• Native & cross-platform - one lightweight Tauri 2 app that feels at home on Linux, macOS, and Windows.
• Non-destructive - every edit lands in a working copy, so your original file stays untouched until you choose to save. Undo/redo has your back (50 steps).
• Offline & private - no cloud, no accounts, no telemetry. Your documents never leave your machine.

What it covers today

View & navigate

• Menu bar (File, Edit, Pages, Document, Annotate, Security, View, Help) plus a slim quick-access row - all page tools live in menus; Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+P opens a searchable command palette
• Smooth viewer with 25%–400% zoom; thumbnail sidebar matches viewer height
• Page navigation via menus, quick bar, thumbnails, keyboard, mouse wheel at scroll edges, and a clickable Bookmarks outline
• Find text across the document with match highlighting (Ctrl/Cmd+F); selectable text layer with native copy and Highlight Selection
• Continuous scroll mode (View → Continuous scroll) with virtualized page rendering
• Document tabs - multiple PDFs open at once (Ctrl+Tab / Ctrl+W)
• Open via File → Open PDF (Ctrl/Cmd+O), in-app path entry, Recently Opened, built-in PDF browser, or native open/save dialogs

Organize pages

• Delete, duplicate, rotate (90° steps), and drag-and-drop reorder
• Insert pages from another PDF (range + position; merges form fields, dedups fonts)
• Merge another PDF by appending its pages to the end (page range supported)
• Split into multiple files by page range
• Extract a page range into a new PDF without changing the open document
• Reverse page order, rotate all pages, insert a blank page, or delete a page range
• Export PNG/JPEG/WebP/BMP/TIFF/GIF/PPM/TGA/ICO or export current page / each page as PDF
• Rotate 180°, rotate all CCW, move page to first/last/up/down, swap pages, blank before/after
• Insert image as new page, page header/footer text, duplicate page range or duplicate all
• Replace current page, interleave or prepend another PDF, split odd/even or split every N, set page size (Letter/A4/Legal)
• Rotate/move/keep/reverse page range, reset rotation range, crop range, crop/expand/shrink odd/even, clear crop odd/even, insert blank pages, blank between/before/after odd/even, duplicate range to start/end/before, duplicate page/odd/even (append, before, to start, or to end), rotate odd/even (CW/CCW/180/reset), rotate all 180°, keep/delete odd/even, flatten odd/even, sort by rotation/size (all or odd/even parity), delete every Nth, move range to start/end, reverse odd/even, move odd/even to start/end, extract/export odd/even (PDF or PNG/JPEG/WebP/BMP/TIFF/GIF/PPM/TGA/ICO), parity tools (1766 commands: in-range global/local/mod-3…mod-6/half/third-range + sort desc + document-wide mod-3…mod-6 via Parity Range modal), split at page, shrink margins, bookmark/size odd/even
• Page border, expand margins, bookmark all pages, flatten all, sort by page size, clear metadata
• Add/rename/remove/clear bookmarks, page dimensions, page numbers, headers/footers/borders/watermarks (all or odd/even parity), crop (single/all/clear), flatten annotations
• View and edit document metadata (title, author, subject, keywords, creator, producer)

Annotate & mark up

• Highlights (H), sticky notes (N), freehand ink (D), shapes (S - rectangle/ellipse/line)
• Stamps (T - APPROVED, DRAFT, CONFIDENTIAL, REVIEWED, plus image stamps) and redaction boxes (X)
• In-PDF text blocks (E), Edit text (click existing text runs), and vector rectangles (G), embedded images (I) - all persisted in the PDF
• Annotations panel (View) - document-wide list with navigate and delete
• Apply redactions - burn in redaction boxes (optional OCR restore); Bates numbering; Make Searchable (OCR) for scanned pages

Forms & signatures

• Interactive forms (F) - list, fill, and create text / checkbox / choice / radio fields
• PAdES digital signatures - sign with a PKCS#12 certificate (.p12/.pfx); list and verify in the Signatures panel
• Password protect - export an encrypted copy; decrypt to _decrypted.pdf; open encrypted PDFs with a prompt

Convert & export

• PDF → Markdown - tagged-PDF structure when available (headings, lists, tables with THead/TBody, links, TOC, captions, code, notes, inline emphasis); otherwise PDFium heuristic layout with column reading order, paragraph merge, header/footer stripping, and link/URL autodetection; on save, scanned/sparse pages, embedded images (JPEG/PNG/Gray/CMYK/Indexed/JPX, CCITT Fax scans, RunLength 1-bit), and painted Form XObjects (vector charts rasterized via PDFium, including nested form content) land in <md-stem>_assets/ with optional Tesseract OCR; auto-save sibling .md or Save As… for a custom path
• Summarize - extractive overview, key points, and extracted headings/emails/URLs/dates
• Optimize - strip metadata, recompress images, prune unused objects, compress streams
• Export PNG/JPEG/WebP/BMP/TIFF/GIF/PPM/TGA/ICO - save rendered pages as image files (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+B)
• Print via the system print dialog
• Help → Check for Updates… (AppImage / macOS / Windows; signed latest.json when release artifacts are published)

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Setup (build from source)

Prerequisites

• Node.js 24+
• Rust (edition 2021)
• Linux: GTK/WebKit dev packages plus libcups2-dev (see .github/workflows/ci.yml for the exact apt list)
• Linux (optional): mold linker and sccache for faster builds (configured in .cargo/config.toml)

Fetch PDFium (required for rendering)

Rendering uses pdfium-render against a standard PDFium build (the C FPDF_* API). Fetch the prebuilt library first:

scripts/fetch-pdfium.sh

This installs into src-tauri/vendor/pdfium/ (gitignored). The app also resolves PDFium via PDFIUM_LIB_PATH, next to the executable, the bundled resource path, then the system library.

Note: distro packages such as libdeepin-pdfium expose a different C++ API and are not compatible.

Tesseract OCR (optional, for scans)

Markdown export can OCR scanned pages, sparse-text pages, and embedded/form images when Tesseract is installed.

Platform	Typical install
Linux	tesseract + tesseract-data-eng (or your distro’s language packs)
macOS	brew install tesseract
Windows	UB Mannheim builds

Markdown view (Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+M) runs the full save pipeline: page PNGs and image assets land in <md-stem>_assets/, with OCR blocks appended where Tesseract is available. Without Tesseract you still get PDFium text and image assets; scanned pages show a plain-language notice in the header/toast. On first launch (and when opening Markdown without Tesseract), the app offers an optional install guide with a Do not remind me again checkbox; Help → Install Tesseract appears only while OCR is not detected.

The convert_pdf_to_markdown API is text/heuristics only (no assets, no OCR) - the UI does not use it.

Run in development

npm install
npm run tauri dev

Always use the Tauri CLI for dev and release builds - a plain cargo build --release produces a dev-mode binary that expects the Vite dev server.

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Install

Grab a prebuilt package from the Releases page, or build your own with the helpers under scripts/:

Target	Command
Linux - .deb / .rpm	scripts/build-linux-packages.sh
Linux - AppImage	scripts/build-appimage.sh (prefetches linuxdeploy; NO_STRIP=1 default on glibc 2.38+)
macOS - .app / .dmg	scripts/build-macos.sh
Windows - .msi / .exe	scripts/build-windows.sh
Any - standalone binary	npx tauri build --no-bundle → src-tauri/target/release/pdf-panda

Run the GitHub Actions release workflow manually (Actions → Release → Run workflow) to build and publish .deb, .rpm, AppImage, macOS, and Windows artifacts (unsigned by default; optional macOS/Windows package signing via repository secrets - see docs/SIGNING.md).

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Tweak

Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl/Cmd+O	Open PDF (File menu)
Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+P	Command palette (search all actions)
Ctrl/Cmd+S / Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+S	Save / Save As
Ctrl/Cmd+W	Close PDF
Ctrl/Cmd+Z / Ctrl/Cmd+Y	Undo / Redo
Ctrl/Cmd+R	Rotate page
Ctrl/Cmd+P	Print
Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+M	PDF ↔ Markdown
Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+O	Optimize
Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+E	Summarize
Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+U	Digital sign
Ctrl/Cmd+F	Find text in PDF
Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+I / Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+G / Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+J / Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+K / Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+B	Insert / Merge / Extract / Split / Export image
Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+N / Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+Y	Insert blank page / Reverse page order
Ctrl/Cmd+0, Ctrl/Cmd +/−	Reset / change zoom
H N D S T X E G I F	Highlight / note / draw / shape / stamp / redact / page text / vector / image / forms
Delete · Escape	Delete page (confirm) · exit tool or close modal

Linux (Wayland & GPU)

• File dialogs: Open/Save default to in-app path entry and the built-in PDF browser on Linux Wayland - the XDG desktop-portal picker can hang WebKitGTK on some stacks. macOS, Windows, and Linux X11 use native Choose file… buttons by default. Set PDF_PANDA_NATIVE_DIALOGS=1 to opt in on Wayland; PDF_PANDA_DISABLE_NATIVE_DIALOGS=1 forces in-app paths everywhere.
• DMABUF renderer: At startup the app sets WEBKIT_DISABLE_DMABUF_RENDERER=1 when unset, avoiding Gdk Error 71 (Protocol error) crashes on some multi-GPU Wayland setups. GPU compositing stays on; only zero-copy presentation is disabled. Set your own value before launch to override.

Environment variables

Variable	Purpose
PDFIUM_LIB_PATH	Override path to the PDFium shared library
PDF_PANDA_OCR_LANG	Tesseract language(s), e.g. eng, deu, or eng+deu (default eng)
TESSERACT_CMD	Path to the tesseract executable when not on PATH
PDF_PANDA_TESSDATA_PREFIX / TESSDATA_PREFIX	Directory containing .traineddata files
PDF_PANDA_OCR_PSM	Page segmentation mode 0–13 (default 1, auto page + OSD)
PDF_PANDA_NATIVE_DIALOGS	1 = enable native file dialogs on Linux Wayland
PDF_PANDA_DISABLE_NATIVE_DIALOGS	1 = in-app path entry only (all platforms)
WEBKIT_DISABLE_DMABUF_RENDERER	1 = disable WebKitGTK DMABUF (set automatically on Linux when unset)
PDF_PANDA_TEST_PDF	PDF path for the ignored render_real_pdf_smoke integration test

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Contribute

Contributions are welcome - issues, fixes, and features alike.

Quick rules:

• Match the existing style, and keep commits focused.
• Run the quality gates before you push: scripts/smoke-test.sh (Rust unit tests, clippy, fmt, tsc, eslint, npm audit) and, on Linux, npm run test:e2e.
• Help → Licenses shows bundled GPL, third-party (Rust + shipped npm), acknowledgment, and runtime license texts offline - searchable with line numbers, wrap, and copy.
• Help → Credits lists every Cargo crate, shipped npm package, and runtime component with filter, license badges, and project links.
• Regenerate license supplements with scripts/generate-credits.sh after Rust or npm dependency changes.
• PDF Panda is GPL v3 - derivative works must stay open source under compatible terms.

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Licence

PDF Panda is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0. Copyright © VisorCraft LLC.