Paperwing

The free, open-source desktop alternative to Adobe Acrobat for Windows and macOS.

Edit, sign, convert, organize, compress and protect PDFs in a familiar desktop workspace — offline, with no account, no subscription and no upsells.

paperwingapp.com · Built by Rohan Vijaykumar

---

Why Paperwing?

If you've used Acrobat, you already know how to use Paperwing: the same tabbed workspace, All tools panel, Edit / Convert / E-Sign tabs, floating quick-action toolbar and right-hand navigation rail — and the same keyboard shortcuts.

What you won't find: sign-in prompts, cloud nags, trial pop-ups, AI overlays, paywalled buttons or a monthly bill. Every feature is free, and your files never leave your computer.

	Paperwing	Acrobat Pro
Price	Free, forever	Subscription
Account required	No	Yes
Works offline	Yes¹	Partly
Upsell / AI pop-ups	None	Frequent
Open source	Yes (AGPL-3.0)	No
Portable (no install) on Windows	Yes	No
Familiar Acrobat-style workspace & shortcuts	Yes	—

¹ A few tools fetch their engine once on first use; see Privacy.

Paperwing is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Adobe. It is a desktop app, distributed only through paperwingapp.com and this repository's Releases. It isn't connected to PaperWingPDF (paperwingpdf.com), a separate set of browser-based PDF tools. See Trademarks.

Features

A complete PDF workspace

• Tabbed documents and a Home view with recent and starred files, shown with a preview of their first page
• A searchable All tools sidebar: every tool, grouped like Acrobat's, with pinned and recently used tools on top
• Every tool opens right beside your document — no separate tool pages
• Floating quick-action toolbar: select, comment, highlight, draw, text box, sign, shapes, stamps
• Right rail with comments, bookmarks, page thumbnails, find, page navigation, rotate and zoom (pick a level or type any percentage)
• Light and dark themes that follow your system automatically (neutral, Acrobat-style dark mode)

100+ tools from BentoPDF

• Edit — edit text & images, annotate, redact, watermarks, headers & footers, page numbers, Bates numbering, bookmarks, stamps, crop
• Convert — PDF to Word, Excel, images, text, Markdown, JSON; Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images, ebooks, email, Markdown and 30+ formats to PDF
• Organize — combine, split, reorder, rotate, insert, delete and extract pages; N-up, booklets, attachments, layers
• E-Sign & forms — fill & sign, digital certificates, signature validation, timestamps, create and fill forms
• Optimize & protect — compress, OCR, repair, PDF/A, encrypt, remove restrictions, sanitize, flatten, compare documents

Designed around Acrobat's most common complaints

• 🔒 Private by default — everything runs locally; no account, telemetry or uploads
• ⚡ Fast and light — opens in about a second, scrolls at a steady 60 fps, and restores your last session without loading every document up front
• 🖼️ PDF thumbnails in File Explorer (Windows) while Paperwing is your default PDF app
• ⌨️ Acrobat shortcuts — including the single-key tool accelerators (H, V, S, U, D, X…), on by default
• 🔎 Command palette — Ctrl+Shift+P finds any tool or command instantly
• 📌 Pin your tools — pinned and recently used tools sit at the top of the tools panel
• 💾 Never lose work — unsaved-change markers, save prompts on close, session restore, and recovery of documents a tool made but you hadn't saved yet if the app closes unexpectedly
• 📍 Pick up where you left off — documents reopen at the page and zoom you left them at
• 📚 Batch tools — run Compress, Flatten, PDF to Word and other tools on many files at once
• 🔄 Updates itself (Windows installer): tells you when there's a new version and installs it when you choose Update
• ↩️ Reopen closed tab — Ctrl+Shift+T, just like your browser
• 🧪 Non-destructive tools — results open in a new tab; your original stays untouched until you save
• 🗂️ Native file dialogs and real "Save" back to the original file
• 🎒 Portable mode on Windows — run from a USB stick with settings stored next to the app

Download

Download it from paperwingapp.com, which picks the right file for your computer, or from the Releases page.

Platform	File	Notes
Windows — installer	Paperwing-Setup-<version>-x64.exe	Start-menu entry, file association, uninstaller
Windows — portable	Paperwing-Portable-<version>-win-x64.zip	Unzip anywhere and run Paperwing.exe; settings stay in the folder
macOS — Apple Silicon	Paperwing-<version>-mac-arm64.dmg	M1 / M2 / M3 / M4 Macs
macOS — Intel	Paperwing-<version>-mac-x64.dmg	Intel Macs

Paperwing isn't code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen and macOS Gatekeeper will warn the first time you open it. See Installation for the one-time steps.

FAQ

Is Paperwing the same as PaperWingPDF?

No. Paperwing is this desktop app for Windows and macOS. PaperWingPDF (paperwingpdf.com) is a separate set of browser-based PDF tools by a different developer; the two projects aren't connected.

Do I need to install LibreOffice for Word, Excel and PowerPoint conversions?

No. The conversion engine isn't in the installer, to keep the download small, but you don't install anything yourself: the first time you convert an Office file, Paperwing downloads it once (about 75 MB) from this repository's GitHub Releases and verifies it against a SHA-256 hash.

Does redaction actually remove the content, or just draw a box over it?

It removes it. When you apply a redaction, the text and graphics under the marked area are deleted from the page itself, not just covered. Redaction doesn't touch the document's metadata (author, title and so on); use the Sanitize tool to strip that too.

Why does Windows or macOS warn me when I open it?

Paperwing isn't code-signed yet. The warning appears for any unsigned app; the full source is here, and you can build it yourself.

Does it work offline?

Yes. The exceptions are the one-time downloads listed under Privacy: the Office conversion engine, and OCR in languages other than English. The other engines (PyMuPDF, Ghostscript, coherentpdf, Tesseract with English…) come with the app.

Screenshots

Keyboard shortcuts

Paperwing mirrors Acrobat's defaults (⌘ replaces Ctrl on macOS). A few favourites:

Action	Shortcut
Open / Save / Save as	Ctrl+O · Ctrl+S · Shift+Ctrl+S
Find / find next	Ctrl+F · F3
Zoom in / out / fit page / actual size	Ctrl+= · Ctrl+- · Ctrl+0 · Ctrl+1
Rotate view	Shift+Ctrl++ / -
Page thumbnails / tools panel	F4 · Shift+F4
Highlight · comment · draw · text box	U · S · D · X
Read mode · full screen	Ctrl+H · Ctrl+L
Search tools & commands	Shift+Ctrl+P

The full list is in docs/SHORTCUTS.md and inside the app under Help ▸ Keyboard shortcuts.

Privacy

All PDF processing happens on your computer. Paperwing has no accounts, analytics or telemetry. The only network requests it makes are:

• an optional check of this repository's GitHub Releases for updates, every time Paperwing starts and every two hours while it's open (can be turned off in Preferences). When there's a new version, Paperwing tells you and downloads nothing until you choose to: the Windows installer then downloads and installs it, and the portable build and macOS download the right file;
• the Word, Excel and PowerPoint → PDF converters download the LibreOffice engine (about 75 MB, once) from this repository's GitHub Releases the first time you use them. It's left out of the installer to keep the download small, and it's checked against a SHA-256 hash before it's used;
• Timestamp (and a digital signature with a timestamp) contacts the timestamp server you pick, sending only a hash of the document;
• OCR in English works offline. Other languages download their Tesseract data (a few MB each) from jsDelivr the first time you use them, and for non-Latin scripts the font for the text layer comes from a CDN;
• for text in fonts a document doesn't embed, a fallback font is used. The Latin one ships with Paperwing; for other scripts (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew) it's downloaded from a CDN the first time it's needed, as is the Latin font in the Edit text tool.

How Paperwing works

Paperwing is a fork of BentoPDF. BentoPDF is a web app: each of its tools is a page that processes PDFs in the browser with open-source libraries compiled to WebAssembly, so nothing is uploaded. Paperwing keeps that code unchanged and adds three layers around it:

Layer	What it does	Code
BentoPDF	All PDF work: the 100+ tools, plus the document viewer (EmbedPDF on PDFium), pdf-lib, PDF.js, qpdf, Tesseract OCR, LibreOffice and more	src/js, src/pages, public
Workspace	The Acrobat-style interface: tabs, Home, the searchable tools sidebar, the viewer workspace, shortcuts, preferences	app.html, src/acro/
Integration	Restyles every BentoPDF tool page (light/dark, Acrobat look) and connects it to the workspace: passes the open file in and catches the result	src/reskin/, reskin/
Desktop app	Electron: serves the built app from disk, native open/save dialogs, file associations, launch screen, portable mode	desktop/

When you open a PDF, it appears in BentoPDF's viewer. When you pick a tool, Paperwing loads that BentoPDF tool page beside the document and hands it your file. BentoPDF's code does the work on your computer, and Paperwing opens the result in a new tab or saves it where you choose.

Apart from two lines in vite.config.ts that register Paperwing's build plugin and a handful of security fixes (listed in docs/UPSTREAM-PATCHES.md), BentoPDF's code is included unmodified, so new BentoPDF releases can be merged in directly.

Build from source

You need Node.js 22 or newer.

git clone https://github.com/rohanvijaykumar/paperwing.git
cd paperwing
npm ci                      # BentoPDF dependencies
cd desktop && npm ci        # desktop shell dependencies
npm run dev                 # build the web app and launch Paperwing

Packaging, testing and the release process are covered in docs/BUILDING.md.

Credits

Paperwing is built on BentoPDF by Alam and contributors. BentoPDF provides every one of the 100+ tools and all of the PDF processing, including its integration of PDFium, PDF.js, pdf-lib, qpdf, LibreOffice and more. Paperwing adds the desktop application and the Acrobat-style interface on top (see How Paperwing works).

If Paperwing is useful to you, please consider sponsoring BentoPDF's author ❤️

Full third-party notices are in NOTICE.md. BentoPDF's original README is preserved in docs/BENTOPDF.md.

Contributing

Bug reports, ideas and pull requests are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md. Problems with an individual tool's output usually come from BentoPDF's tool code; we'll help route them upstream.

License

Paperwing is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0, the same license as BentoPDF. You're free to use, study, modify and share it; if you distribute a modified version, you must make its source available under the same license.

Trademarks

Adobe and Acrobat are registered trademarks of Adobe Inc. Paperwing is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Adobe. These names are used only to describe the kind of software Paperwing is an alternative to. Paperwing contains no Adobe code, logos, icons or fonts.