Free and open-source PDF editor for Windows. View, annotate, OCR, merge, split, edit text, draw, sign, fill forms, print, flatten, and open password-protected PDFs without an Adobe subscription or a phone-home. Install or run portable. Single Windows EXE, ~14.6 MB (ZIPs to 10.2MB), no runtime install required.
Landing page is hosted at KillerPDF.net
I hate Adobe. Acrobat is bloated, wants a subscription to do basic things, and phones home constantly. Most of the "free" alternatives are either ad-riddled, cloud-based, or rebrands of the same PDF engine sold under three different names.
KillerPDF is what I wanted: local-only, portable, no account, no telemetry. The PDF equivalent of Notepad.
- High-quality rendering via PDFium
- Four view modes - Single Page, Continuous scroll, Two-Page, and Grid - that persist across sessions
- Tabbed documents: open several PDFs at once, each restoring its page, zoom, and view mode
- Full-text search across the whole document with highlighting; drag-select to copy text
- Outline/bookmark navigation and clickable links, including internal cross-references and TOC back-links
- Zoom presets with scroll-wheel sync; Fit to Width and Fit Page re-apply on resize
- Full-screen mode (F11) hides all chrome so only the document fills the screen
- Recent files on the start screen and Open menu, each with its real Windows file-type icon
- Inline text editing with font matching against the original document
- Resizable, word-wrapping text boxes with an optional whiteout background fill
- Freehand draw, a straight-line tool, and highlight - each with its own color, opacity, and width
- Full RGB color picker: saturation/value square, hue strip, hex input, screen eyedropper, and editable palette
- Select tool to move, resize, multi-select, and restyle any annotation in place
- Insert images as resizable annotations, burned into the PDF on save
- Page-number and watermark stamping across a page range, applied as one undo
- OCR a whole page or a dragged region straight to the clipboard
- Make Searchable PDF: lay an invisible text layer over a scan
- Extract All Text to a
.txtor.mdfile - Tesseract bundled in the single EXE; extra languages download on demand
- Merge multiple PDFs and split out selected pages, with drag-and-drop reordering
- Right-click sidebar: insert blank page, rotate, move, extract, or delete - on multi-page selections
- Crop with corner handles; remove crop from one page or all
- Transform: rotate by 90 degrees or a fine angle, scale, flip, and straighten a crooked scan by drawing a level line - live preview, with annotations following the transform
- Drop a folder or
.ziponto the window to merge the PDFs and images inside into one, or open each separately
- Fill PDF forms (text, checkbox, radio) as live controls and save back to the PDF
- Digital signatures with a cloud certificate (Certum SimplySign), including click-to-sign form fields
- Draw and reuse signatures and initials, or import a PNG/JPG/BMP to place anywhere
- Print with annotations flattened, a real in-app preview, and scale / position / margins / pages-per-sheet / color / two-sided options, rendered at 300 DPI
- Save Flattened PDF: rasterize every page into a fully uneditable document
- Document Info: view and edit title, author, subject, keywords, and creator metadata
- Six themes - Dark, Light, Black, Blood, Greed, Cyanotic - with per-theme accent colors, switchable live
- Toolbar style (icon size, text placement) and a resizable sidebar that docks left or right
- Localized UI in 8 languages (English, Spanish, Traditional and Simplified Chinese, German, French, Turkish, Bengali); contribute via
Strings/TRANSLATING.md - Full keyboard shortcut overlay (Ctrl+?) with a link to the online guide
- Single portable Windows EXE, ~6 MB zipped, no runtime install
- Self-installs per-user to %LOCALAPPDATA% (no UAC), registers as a PDF handler with a branded file icon, and uninstalls cleanly via Add/Remove Programs
- Opens password-protected PDFs (prompts instead of erroring) and repairs damaged ones
- Local-only: no account, no telemetry, no phone-home
- Windows 10 or 11 (x64)
- No runtime install. Everything needed is inside the EXE (targets .NET Framework 4.8, which ships with every supported Windows release).
WinGet:
winget install killerpdf- Prebuilt binary: https://github.com/SteveTheKiller/KillerPDF/releases/latest/download/KillerPDF.exe
- Source (GPL3 corresponding source for this release): https://github.com/SteveTheKiller/KillerPDF/releases/download/v1.6.0/KillerPDF-1.6.0-src.zip
git clone https://github.com/SteveTheKiller/KillerPDF.git
cd KillerPDF
dotnet publish -c ReleaseOutput lands in bin/Release/net48/publish/. The publish step produces a single Costura-bundled KillerPDF.exe plus a versioned KillerPDF-<version>-src.zip for GPL3 source distribution.
Requires the .NET 8 SDK or later to build (even though the output targets .NET Framework 4.8).
See CHANGELOG.md.
GPLv3. See LICENSE. If you fork, modify, or redistribute KillerPDF, your version must also be released under GPLv3 with source available. No exceptions for commercial rebrands.