VerusPDF

VerusPDF is a free, local desktop app that does the PDF things most people actually need: merge, split, rotate, extract pages and text, encrypt and decrypt, manage bookmarks, optimize files, and edit text in place. No subscription, no paywall. The hardest engineering problem was text editing. It required building a PDF content-stream parser and editor from the specification itself (ISO 32000): tokenizing content streams, handling font resources and character encodings, and rewriting transformation matrices so an edited span renders exactly where the original did. Document-level plumbing rides on pdfcpu, and rendering uses pdf.js inside a Wails v2 shell (native desktop, no Electron). GitHub Actions builds every release for Windows, macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), and Linux, then publishes the binaries to S3 for direct download from the site.