Stapler

Stapler is an offline-first, client-side PDF toolkit designed for privacy, speed, and simplicity. Perform common PDF operations directly in your browser without ever uploading your sensitive documents to a third-party server.

Features

41 tools, all running locally in one page:

• Organize: merge, reorder, rotate, duplicate, delete, insert, split & extract, remove blank pages, N-up & booklet.
• Optimize: compress (with a target-size mode) and scan cleanup (de-warp, despeckle, contrast).
• Document: crop, watermark / header & footer / Bates numbering, bookmarks, normalize page sizes, sign & fill forms, redact (text, images, form values and metadata — verified in the saved bytes), metadata inspector and scrubber, alt-text editor, annotate, compare, OCR text layer, table extraction.
• Convert: PDF ↔ images, Markdown → PDF, and best-effort (beta) PDF ↔ Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
• Automation: batch-process a whole folder with saved recipes.

Privacy Guarantee

Your files never leave your device. All processing is done locally. We do not collect, store, or transmit your documents or any personal data.

There is exactly one exception to "no network", and it is opt-in: OCR needs a language model (about 3 MB for English, 1.4 MB more for Hindi) that is not bundled. The first time you run OCR in a language, Stapler asks before downloading it once from a pinned URL, checks its SHA-256 hash, and caches it on your device. You can also load the model from a file instead. Nothing about your documents is ever sent.

For more details, please see our Privacy Policy.

Verify it yourself rather than take our word for it: open DevTools' Network tab, clear it, and use any tool other than a first OCR run — no request to any server appears. The same check runs in the test suite (pnpm run verify, which includes the zero-network E2E assertion in tests/e2e/zero-network.spec.ts).

Installation

From the Chrome Web Store

Install Stapler from the Chrome Web Store

Build from Source

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/yogesh-bhatttk/stapler.git
   cd stapler
   

2. Install dependencies: We recommend using pnpm.

   pnpm install
   

3. Run the development server:

   pnpm run dev
   

4. Build for production (Browser Extension):

   pnpm run build:ext
   

   This generates the unpacked extension in dist/ext.

5. Load as an unpacked extension:

   • Open Chrome and navigate to chrome://extensions/.
   • Enable "Developer mode" in the top right corner.
   • Click "Load unpacked" and select the dist/ext directory generated in the previous step.

Development Commands

• pnpm run build - Build the extension and web targets
• pnpm run check - Run TypeScript compiler, ESLint, Prettier, and custom checks
• pnpm run test - Run Vitest unit tests
• pnpm run test:e2e - Run Playwright end-to-end tests
• pnpm run verify - Run all checks and tests (recommended before submitting a PR or release)

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

Every build also ships THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.txt, generated by scripts/third-party-licenses.mjs, with the licence and notice texts of the bundled open-source packages and of the two fonts kept in this repository (Noto Sans Devanagari and Liberation Sans, both under the SIL Open Font License 1.1).

LGPL notice. HEIC images are decoded with libheif-js, a WebAssembly build of libheif and libde265, which are licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0. You may replace that library with a modified version: build Stapler from source as above with your copy of libheif-js in place of the version pinned in pnpm-lock.yaml (for example with a pnpm override), and the resulting extension or website uses it. The LGPL-3.0 and GPL-3.0 texts are reproduced in THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.txt.