---

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.

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. See Trademarks.

Features

A complete PDF workspace

• Tabbed documents and a Home view with recent and starred files
• 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
• 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, with the PDF viewer warmed up in the background
• ⌨️ 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, and session restore
• ↩️ 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

Get the latest version from the Releases page.

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.

Screenshots

Keyboard shortcuts

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

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, once-a-day check of this repository's GitHub Releases for updates (can be turned off in Preferences);
• 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;
• a few advanced tools (PDF/A conversion, font outlining and some extraction tools) download their open-source engines from a CDN the first time you use them, as in BentoPDF;
• the text editor may fetch fallback fonts from a CDN when a document uses fonts that aren't embedded.

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:

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, 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.