PDF-EZ

Brand accent: fountain-pen blue #2b4acb / #7d95f2

Offline desktop PDF editor and Typora-style Markdown editor. Free and open source (Apache-2.0). No subscription, no account, no cloud, no telemetry: documents never leave the machine, and the app makes zero network calls in normal use.

Architecture

src/                Vue 3 + TypeScript + Vite frontend (PDF viewer, Markdown
                     editor, license gate); App.vue routes between the two by
                     the opened file's extension
  components/PdfViewer.vue       PDF viewer/editor UI
  components/MarkdownEditor.vue  Tiptap-based WYSIWYG Markdown editor — no
                                  visible `#`/`**` syntax while typing, reads
                                  and writes plain .md text via tiptap-markdown
src-tauri/          Tauri v2 shell, pure Rust (no sidecar runtime)
  src/pdf_worker.rs  Dedicated engine thread owning PDFium (not thread-safe) +
                     all open documents; commands talk to it over mpsc
  src/license.rs     Ed25519 lease verification (offline, pubkey baked in)
  src/bin/mint_lease.rs  Dev tool: mint signed leases (feature: dev-tools)
  pdfium/            pdfium.dll (fetched, not committed — BSD-3, non-V8 build)
  keys/license.pub   Embedded verify key (license.key = dev signer, gitignored)
shellext/            Windows Explorer integration (pdez_shell.dll): thumbnails
                     + preview pane for both .pdf and .md/.markdown. Both
                     formats share the same two COM classes — Initialize()
                     content-sniffs the stream (`%PDF-` header) and dispatches
                     to the PDFium engine or to src/md_engine.rs, a lightweight
                     GDI-based Markdown text rasterizer (pulldown-cmark parse +
                     direct-to-DIB drawing, no browser engine involved).

Engine: PDFium via pdfium-render for PDF. Write layer (planned per capability audit): lopdf, qpdf, krilla, Tesseract sidecar for OCR, CMS crates + Windows CNG for PAdES digital signatures. Markdown editing is Tiptap (ProseMirror) + tiptap-markdown in the frontend — the on-disk format is always plain Markdown text, Tiptap only owns the live editing view.

Dev setup

pwsh scripts/fetch-pdfium.ps1   # once: fetch pdfium.dll
pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev                  # vite on port 3011 (see E:\Programming\PORT_REGISTRY.md)

Debug builds run unlicensed (DEV badge). To test the license path:

cargo run --features dev-tools --bin mint_lease -- you@example.com order-42
# then import the .lease via the app's activation screen

Tests: cargo test (license signature round-trip lives in license.rs).

Licensing code (retained, not enforced)

src-tauri/src/license.rs implements offline Ed25519 lease verification, and it stays in the tree as a working reference for airgapped license checking. It does not gate the application. PDF-EZ was briefly planned as a $4.99 one-time product; that was dropped in favor of Apache-2.0. Nothing is locked, nothing needs activating, and no key is required to build or run.

Related

• Capability audit + tier plan: PDF-EZ scope-lock artifact (2026-07-05).
• Monorepo host: E:\Programming (this is an embedded studio repo).

Redaction: read this before you rely on it

PDF-EZ redaction removes the underlying page objects rather than drawing a black box over them, which is the correct approach and the one most cheap tools get wrong. It is still not certified for legal, medical, or classified material. No independent audit has been performed. If a failed redaction would cause real harm in your situation, verify the output yourself before releasing it.

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.

PDFium is BSD-3-Clause and is fetched at build time, not vendored here.