pdfu

nobody should have to print a PDF to fill it out.

A cross-platform PDF editor built around one unglamorous job: filling out a form that someone sent you as a PDF. Type anywhere on the page, save it half-finished and come back to it, then export a PDF that keeps everything the original had — its fonts, its layout, even its own fillable fields.

what it does

• Type anywhere. Text boxes go on the page wherever you put them, not only in fields the form's author remembered to define. Move, resize, rotate; undo removes your sentence, not one letter at a time.
• Save and resume. Work in progress saves to a .pdfu file that stores the original PDF byte-for-byte and keeps your edits separate and editable. Autosave and crash recovery mean a crash costs you seconds, not the session.
• Export without wrecking the original. Your edits are drawn onto the pristine original bytes, so the PDF's fonts, layout, metadata, and its own fillable fields all survive the round trip.
• Make forms, not just fill them. Place your own fillable fields on any PDF — named, styled, auto-sizing to fit the blank — without an Acrobat licence or uploading the document to anyone.
• Legible after the fax. Ships with Atkinson Hyperlegible, a font designed against exactly the letter confusions a 1-bit fax creates — because fax is still how a surprising amount of paperwork moves.

status

in development Usable end to end: open, type, save, export. Viewing (continuous scroll, zoom, thumbnails), editing with undo/redo, .pdfu save/load with autosave and crash recovery, PDF export, and form authoring all work, backed by 131 tests. Still to come: images, page operations, signatures and ink, filling in the form fields a PDF already has, fax preview, and installers.

export landed — this now does the job Xournal++ was kept around for

specs

Platform	Windows, macOS, Linux
Built with	Tauri — Rust core, TypeScript/React interface
Network	none required; PDFs are processed locally
Licence	MIT