OpenAEC-Foundation/open-pdf-studio

A free, open-source PDF editor and annotator for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android.

Open PDF Studio is a lightweight, native desktop application that provides professional-grade PDF annotation, markup, and editing tools without subscriptions, telemetry, or bloatware. Built with Tauri 2 and web technologies, it delivers a fast, modern experience with a Microsoft Office-style ribbon interface.

It is built for people who work with drawings: import DWG and DXF as a vector PDF with layers and a measuring scale, measure and take off quantities, export a page back to CAD, verify digital signatures, make scans searchable with OCR, and let an AI assistant operate the app through a local connection.

_{Parametric walls with self-trimming corners, doors, windows and rooms — drawn to scale on a blank sheet.}

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Professional annotation, markup, measurement, redaction and page management — the tools that typical commercial PDF editors lock behind a subscription or a paid tier — are all included, free and fully open source. No subscriptions, no telemetry, no watermarks.

• Text markup: Highlight, underline, strikethrough
• Shapes: Rectangle, ellipse, polygon, cloud, cloud polyline, line, arrow, polyline
• Hatch fill patterns: Cross-hatch, diagonal, dots, and more for shape fills
• Freehand drawing: Pen tool with configurable color, width, and opacity
• Text annotations: Text box, callout with leader line, sticky notes with popup editing
• Stamps: 10 built-in stamps (Approved, Rejected, Draft, Confidential, Final, etc.)
• Images: Insert from file, paste from clipboard, or drag-and-drop, with non-destructive cropping
• Signatures: Draw multi-stroke signatures, save up to 5 for quick reuse
• Redaction: Mark areas and apply to permanently remove content

• Distance, area, and perimeter measurement
• Scale calibration dialog with mm, cm, m, inches, feet, and points
• Per-line scale override, with fallback to the document scale
• Quick scale: right-click a dimension line and type a value (e.g. "12.3m") to recalibrate
• Draggable dimension text and endpoints with live recalculation
• Object snapping to endpoints, midpoints, centers, and edges
• Angle snapping with configurable increments

• Import a DWG or DXF through File > Import, Open, or drag and drop
• Choose layers, model space or a layout with viewports, area, scale, paper, orientation, margins and placement
• Appearance: colours as in the file, all black, greyscale, black and white or a single colour; lineweights from the file, a colour table or a fixed width; linetypes, hatch patterns, dimensions, attributes and points
• External references and images are loaded from the drawing's folder or from search paths you pick
• A live preview renders with the real converter, so what you see is what you get
• The result is a vector PDF: CAD layers become PDF layers and every viewport carries its own measuring scale, so measuring is correct right away
• Target: a new document, a new page, or an underlay on the current page — as vector or image, to scale, below the existing content
• Export a page back to DXF or DWG with the PDF layers as CAD layers, at real size according to the measuring scale, with your markups on their own layers, and optionally in the drawing's original model coordinates

• One switch in Settings > General exposes the app to a local AI assistant over MCP — no start-up flags, local clients only
• Over fifty tools: open and save documents, navigate, create and edit annotations, set the measuring scale, take off quantities and place schedules, import and export CAD, print to a PDF file, and more
• open-pdf-studio.mcpb installs the connection in Claude Desktop with a double click
• An assistant panel inside the app offers ready-made skills: translate, summarise, draw an element, and detect doors

• Make scanned pages searchable and selectable with an invisible text layer
• Current page or the whole document, with automatic language detection or a chosen language
• Desktop only; the Android build ships without OCR

• A bar above the page shows, per signature, whether it is valid, whether the certificate is trusted, and whether the document changed after signing
• A detail dialog shows the certificate chain and the timestamp, and "show the signed version" opens the document as it was when signed
• Reads PKCS#12 and validates against the system certificate store

• Compare two PDF revisions in a dedicated compare tab, without leaving your workspace
• Side-by-side and overlay view modes with synchronized scrolling, panning, and zoom
• Automatic change detection classifies differences as added, removed, or modified
• Filterable change list with counts; click a change to jump straight to it
• Manual alignment offset (dx, dy, rotation) to line up drawings that shifted between revisions
• Page-pair navigation for multi-page documents

• Drag-and-drop symbol libraries onto the page for repetitive markup
• Built-in libraries plus NEN 1414 and Dutch (NL) category sets
• Searchable, collapsible categories; enable or disable groups per project
• Create custom symbol groups saved with your preferences
• Dockable to either side of the canvas or floated freely

• Count tool with named tally categories for on-drawing object counting (takeoff)
• Live quantities schedule that aggregates counts, lengths, and areas
• Grouping, sorting, filtering, subtotals, and grand totals
• Configurable columns, formatting, and table appearance
• Place the generated schedule back onto the page as a table

• Capture full page or a selected region as an image
• Copy to clipboard or save to file

• Auto-detect and trim whitespace around page content

• Edit existing PDF text content inline
• Add new text annotations with font, size, and color control

• Insert blank pages (standard or custom sizes)
• Delete, extract, and replace pages
• Straighten a skewed scan by drawing a line along something that should be level
• Shift page content by dragging the preview or typing an offset in millimetres, for one page, all pages, or the odd/even pages from a chosen page
• Reorder pages via drag-and-drop thumbnails
• Merge multiple PDFs into one
• Page rotation (90/180/270 degrees)

• Text and image watermarks with opacity, rotation, and position control
• Headers and footers with variables ({page}, {pages}, {date}, {time}, {filename})
• Apply to all pages or specific ranges

• Fill interactive PDF forms (AcroForms and XFA)
• Create text fields, checkboxes, and radio buttons
• JavaScript validation support

• Full print dialog with live preview, showing the sheet, its orientation and the resulting scale ("A3 landscape (420 × 297 mm) | Page: 594 × 420 mm | Scale: 71 %")
• Save as PDF at the top of the printer list writes the print as vector with the sheet in the chosen orientation — landscape stays landscape
• Paper and orientation follow the document; large and extended sheets (A1, A0, A3L up to A0L) are supported
• Print to scale (1:1 on the sheet), fit, shrink or a custom percentage, within the printable area
• A page perpendicular to the sheet is turned a quarter so that it fills the sheet
• Page range, subset (odd/even), reverse order, copies, and collation
• Print content: document only, markups only, or both; print as image option
• Virtual printer installation (Windows)

• Export pages as PNG or JPEG (72, 150, 300, 600 DPI)
• Export as raster PDF
• Export/import annotations as XFDF

• Text search with match case and whole word options
• Search the page text, the annotations, or both (text boxes, callouts, sticky notes, stamp text and measurement labels)
• A result list under the search bar shows the hits per page and jumps to them
• Highlight all matches with result count; navigate results with F3

• 12 pre-defined style gallery for quick annotation styling
• Fill color, stroke color, line width, opacity, and border style
• Blend modes for annotation compositing
• Per-annotation-type default styles

• Select multiple annotations with rubber band or Ctrl+Click
• Shared property editing across selected annotations
• 6-point alignment (left, center, right, top, middle, bottom)
• Horizontal and vertical distribution
• Match size (width, height, or both)
• Flip horizontal/vertical and rotate selected annotations
• Z-order control (bring to front/back, forward/backward)

• Snap to endpoints, midpoints, centers, and edges
• Snap to in-progress vertices while drawing polylines and measurements
• Configurable snap radius (3-30px)
• Angle snapping (1-90 degree increments)
• Optional grid overlay with grid snapping

• Floating or dockable toolbar with all annotation tools
• Dock to left or right side of the canvas
• Quick access without switching ribbon tabs

• High-quality native rendering via a multi-process PDFium worker pool — off the UI thread and crash-isolated, so a bad page never freezes or takes down the app
• Progressive tile rendering for very large CAD drawings: the page and its thumbnails fill in tile-by-tile across the worker pool instead of a seconds-long blank wait
• View modes: single page, continuous scroll, and book (two-page spread, page 1 on the right)
• Zoom: fit page, fit width, actual size, custom percentage, and cursor-anchored mouse-wheel zoom
• Page navigation: first, previous, next, last, go to page
• PDF/A compliance detection with read-only enforcement
• Digital signature validation panel

Thumbnails, Bookmarks, Annotations, Attachments, Digital Signatures, Layers, Form Fields, Named Destinations, Links, Tags

• Create, edit, and delete bookmarks
• Hierarchical tree with expand/collapse
• Custom colors and text styling (bold, italic)

• Multi-tab interface for multiple PDFs
• Session save/restore (named workspace snapshots)
• Open PDF from URL
• Bookmarked folder places for quick file access
• Recent files with pin/unpin
• Unsaved changes detection with save prompt
• Document properties dialog
• File locking to prevent external writes

• Primary tabs: Home, Comment, Drawing, View, Organize, Help
• Contextual tabs: Format and Arrange appear automatically when annotations are selected

• 5 themes: Dark, Light, Blue, High Contrast, System (auto-detect)
• 39 languages including RTL support: Arabic, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean,Lao, Malay, Norwegian, Farsi (Persian), Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese
• Configurable preferences dialog

• Up to 100 levels per document
• Covers annotations, page operations, watermarks, and text edits

• Built-in update checker with download progress
• Skip version or remind later options
• Automatic installation and relaunch

From 2026.39 on, a release is named after the year and the ISO week number: 2026.39, tagged v2026.39.

Download the latest .exe installer from Releases.

Download the latest .dmg (universal binary for Intel and Apple Silicon) from Releases.

Snap (Ubuntu App Center):

sudo snap install open-pdf-studio

Debian/Ubuntu (.deb):

sudo dpkg -i open-pdf-studio_*.deb

AppImage:

chmod +x open-pdf-studio_*.AppImage
./open-pdf-studio_*.AppImage

Nix / NixOS (x86_64):

The repository is a Nix flake. It wraps the released Linux AppImage with appimageTools.wrapType2, so nothing is compiled and no cargo or npm hashes are involved.

# Run once without installing
nix run github:OpenAEC-Foundation/open-pdf-studio

# Install into your user profile (adds the menu entry and icons)
nix profile install github:OpenAEC-Foundation/open-pdf-studio

On NixOS you can also add it to your system configuration:

# flake.nix of your system
inputs.open-pdf-studio.url = "github:OpenAEC-Foundation/open-pdf-studio";

# configuration.nix (with `inputs` passed through specialArgs)
environment.systemPackages = [ inputs.open-pdf-studio.packages.x86_64-linux.default ];

Notes:

• Only x86_64-linux is packaged, because releases ship an amd64 AppImage only.
• The flake points at a fixed release. After publishing a release, update its version and hash with node open-pdf-studio/scripts/nix-flake-bijwerken.mjs (it reads the AppImage checksum from the GitHub release; no download needed).
• If the window stays blank with some GPU drivers, start it with WEBKIT_DISABLE_DMABUF_RENDERER=1 open-pdf-studio.

Download the APK from Releases.

• Node.js 20+
• Rust (stable)
• CMake and a C/C++ toolchain
• System dependencies:
  • Linux: libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libappindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev patchelf
  • macOS: Xcode Command Line Tools; universal release builds also need the aarch64-apple-darwin and x86_64-apple-darwin Rust targets
  • Windows: Visual Studio Build Tools with C++ workload

cd open-pdf-studio
npm ci
npx tauri build

The build automatically downloads the pinned macOS PDFium runtime and verifies its SHA-256 checksum. Build artifacts are written to the workspace-level target/release/bundle/ directory, or target/universal-apple-darwin/release/bundle/ for a universal macOS build.

cd open-pdf-studio
npm ci
npx tauri dev

Contributions are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full guidelines.

In short: because the codebase moves quickly, a clear, well-described issue is usually more valuable than a code pull request — a precise description can be implemented against the current code before a branch would go stale.

Content is the exception to "prefer issues over PRs". We want every symbol library in the world. Symbol sets, hatch patterns, and other reusable content don't go stale the way code does, so content pull requests are actively encouraged — bring the standards and libraries from your country, industry, and discipline. Symbols are organised by industry (e.g. AEC) and country (e.g. NL), and localisation will keep expanding, so libraries for any region are welcome.

We are looking for someone to own and maintain the extensions and the content repository — curating incoming symbol libraries and content contributions, and keeping the ecosystem organised as it grows. If that sounds like you, please open an issue to introduce yourself.

Open PDF Studio is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0.

PDF.js is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. pdf-lib is licensed under the MIT License. PDFium is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License.