A free, open-source, private PDF reader and editor for Windows, macOS and Linux. Edit text, sign, redact, fill forms and automate, all on your own computer. No account, no uploads, works offline.
What it does
- Read: tabs, split view, thumbnails, bookmarks, search across a document or a whole folder, night reading, a command palette (Ctrl+K) for every command.
- Edit text: change any line or paragraph. Paragraphs re-wrap at their width and alignment, mixed styles (bold, italic, color, underline, strikethrough) carry through edits, and new text is drawn in the document's own font when it can be. A live preview shows what will move before you apply.
- Comment and mark up: highlights, notes, text boxes, shapes, freehand ink, stamps and links.
- Pages: organize by drag and drop, rotate, insert, extract, split, merge, crop, resize, several pages per sheet, page labels.
- Forms: fill, create, detect fields automatically, import and export data, and fill one copy per row of a spreadsheet (CSV, Excel, OpenDocument).
- Redact for real: text, pictures and shapes under the boxes are removed from the file, then the rest of the file is checked for the removed text (properties, comments, fields, attachments, hidden entries, earlier versions), with a report of anything that couldn't be checked.
- Sign and protect: digital signatures (later edits are saved on top, keeping the signed revision intact), verification, AES-256 encryption and permissions.
- Scans and codes: offline OCR makes scanned pages searchable; QR codes on pages are read and opened safely.
- Convert: export to Word, Markdown, HTML, text and images; compare two versions; reduce file size; accessibility fixes; PDF/A.
- Automate: record your steps as an action, run it on many files, or watch a folder. The same
quintess program is a full command-line tool that does nearly everything the app does (quintess merge a.pdf b.pdf -o both.pdf; quintess report.pdf opens the app).
- Languages: text in any script, including shaped Hindi and other Indic scripts, Arabic and Hebrew.
The built-in guide (press F1 in the app, or read docs/USER_GUIDE.md) explains the tools, common workflows and their limits.
Install
Windows
Download the installer from the releases page and run it. It installs for your user account only (no administrator rights needed), offers Quintess for opening PDFs without changing your default, and puts the quintess command on your PATH.
| Your PC | Download |
|---|
| Most Windows PCs (Intel or AMD, "x64-based processor") | Quintess-<version>-setup.exe |
| Windows 11 on ARM (Snapdragon and other "ARM-based processor" PCs) | Quintess-<version>-arm64-setup.exe |
Settings ▸ System ▸ About ▸ System type says which you have. The x64 installer also runs on ARM PCs (under emulation) and suggests the ARM64 one there; the ARM64 installer refuses x64 PCs. The installers aren't code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may warn. The ARM64 build is built and tested on GitHub's Windows 11 ARM machines but hasn't been tried by hand on an ARM laptop yet.
macOS
macOS 11 or later, Apple silicon or Intel: download Quintess-<version>-macos.dmg (one universal app for both), open it and drag Quintess into Applications.
Quintess isn't signed with an Apple Developer ID or notarized yet, so macOS refuses it the first time. Open it anyway once: on macOS 15 and later, try to open it, then click Open Anyway in System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security; on macOS 14 and earlier, Control-click it in Applications and choose Open. If macOS calls it "damaged", run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Quintess.app in Terminal. The command-line tool is /Applications/Quintess.app/Contents/MacOS/quintess (link it into /usr/local/bin to type just quintess). Signing from a certificate store, Microsoft Office conversion and self-update are Windows only, and scanning needs SANE from Homebrew. The Mac version is built and tested on GitHub's Mac runners (Apple silicon and Intel) but hasn't been tried by hand on a Mac yet; see Installing on macOS in the guide.
Linux
64-bit Linux with glibc 2.35 or later (Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Fedora 36, Mint 21 and newer). Download a package from the releases page; each has a .sha256 file to check it with sha256sum -c.
Debian, Ubuntu, Mint and other apt systems:
sudo apt install ./quintess_<version>_amd64.deb
(sudo dpkg -i quintess_<version>_amd64.deb works too, followed by sudo apt -f install if it reports missing libraries.) Remove it with sudo apt remove quintess.
Any distribution, with the tarball:
tar -xzf quintess-<version>-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
cd quintess-<version>-linux-x86_64
./install.sh # for you, into ~/.local
sudo ./install.sh --system # or for everyone, into /opt/quintess
Remove it with ~/.local/lib/quintess/uninstall.sh (or sudo /opt/quintess/uninstall.sh). The tarball needs libspeechd2 (Fedora: speech-dispatcher-libs); install.sh names anything missing.
AppImage, nothing to install:
chmod +x Quintess-<version>-x86_64.AppImage
./Quintess-<version>-x86_64.AppImage # the app
./Quintess-<version>-x86_64.AppImage --help # the command-line tool
It needs FUSE to mount itself (libfuse2 or fuse3, present on most desktops); without it, run it with --appimage-extract-and-run. Tools such as Gear Lever or AppImageLauncher add it to the applications menu.
Flatpak, in a sandbox:
flatpak install --user Quintess-<version>-x86_64.flatpak
flatpak run cc.quintess.Quintess
It needs Flatpak and the Flathub remote (flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo), from which it fetches the freedesktop runtime. Inside the sandbox it reaches your Documents and Downloads folders, and any file you pick in a dialog or drop on the window; scanning and converting with LibreOffice or Chrome don't work there (see the guide).
The .deb and the tarball put Quintess in the applications menu and under "Open with" for PDFs, with the command quintess (the app, or the command-line tool when followed by a command). Optional, per feature: cups-client (printing), sane-utils (scanning), speech-dispatcher (read aloud), LibreOffice (converting Office files), xdg-utils (opening links), zenity (file dialogs without a desktop portal), fonts-liberation (stand-in fonts when editing text). On Linux there is no certificate store to sign from (use a .pfx/.p12 file), no Microsoft Office conversion and no self-update; see Installing on Linux in the guide.
Privacy
Quintess never sends your documents anywhere. It goes online only when you ask: checking for updates (off unless you turn it on), and opening links you choose to open.
Building from source
See docs/BUILDING.md. In short: Rust, PDFium from pdfium-binaries in vendor/pdfium (Windows), vendor/pdfium-mac (macOS) or vendor/pdfium-linux (Linux), then cargo build -j 6. ISCC installer\quintess.iss (add /DArch=arm64 for ARM) makes the Windows installers, python3 tools/package_macos.py the Mac disk image, python3 tools/package_linux.py the Linux packages (with --appimage, the AppImage too) and installer/linux/flatpak/build-bundle.sh the Flatpak bundle from the tarball; the workflows in .github/workflows build all of them on GitHub's runners.
License
Quintess is licensed under either of MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option. It is built on PDFium (BSD), about 400 open-source Rust libraries and the ocrs recognition models (CC BY-SA 4.0); see licenses/THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt.
