View, edit, redact, OCR, convert, organize, compare, fill, sign, and batch process PDFs
locally, privately, and without an account.
winget install killerpdfchoco install killerpdf8a41515ac1b5f94f16b55bbe4870abee
Install or run portable. Free, open source, GPLv3.
No accounts or subscriptions required.
No telemetry is sent and no ads... ever.
The people's editor
Much of what KillerPDF does was requested by the people who use it. The GitHub issues page is open to anyone, so anybody can request a feature or report a bug.
Your suggestions genuinely shape where this goes next. Read the story behind the app on the About page.
Informational Brochure (PDF)
Built from scratch
KillerPDF is written in C# and WPF on .NET. It renders through The KillerPDF.Engine and runs OCR on Tesseract, with language models downloaded on demand so the base download stays small.
PDF creation, editing, validation, encryption, and writing are powered by The KillerPDF.Engine, an independent .NET library built from scratch for PDF 2.0 and modern PDF/A. The Technical page shows how it all fits together.
Fully featured
- Four view modes, tabs and split panes
- Edit PDF text in place, by line or paragraph
- Permanent redaction with pattern search
- AES-256 protection and certificate signing
- Export to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more
- OCR scans in twenty languages, on device
- Fill, recognize and flatten forms
- Guided tasks, macros and automatic folders
- Sixty-six commands for scripts
What it does
Annotate & edit
Edit a PDF's own text in place, by line or by paragraph, with Find and Replace across the document, plus text boxes, freehand drawing, lines, shapes with optional fill, and text-hugging highlights, each with its own color, opacity and width. A full RGB color picker on every swatch.
Permanent redaction
Mark areas by hand, by search, or by pattern for email addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, payment cards and IBANs, then remove the content from the page itself, text in form fields and annotations included. The result is verified before it is saved, and a whole-page raster fallback never happens without asking.
Protect & verify
Save AES-256 encrypted copies with passwords, permissions or certificate recipients. Inspect signers, certificate chains, trusted timestamps and later changes, and manage the certificates KillerPDF trusts without touching Windows.
Forms & signing
Fill PDF forms and save them back, recognize fields on a flat form, exchange FDF and XFDF data, convert supported XFA layouts and flatten fields. Draw or import reusable signatures, or sign with a certificate from Windows or a .pfx file, with an RFC 3161 timestamp.
Export to Office & more
Export to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML, Markdown, text or JSON with a page range and a review of what the format cannot carry. Pull a ruled table into XLSX or CSV after correcting its cells, or export pages as images.
Convert & scan in
Turn a .docx or .xlsx into a PDF without Office, convert legacy .doc and .xls through an installed Word or Excel with macros disabled, or scan straight into a new PDF through TWAIN.
OCR built in
OCR a page or a dragged region to the clipboard, make a scanned PDF searchable, or convert a scan's words into real, editable text with a review of the uncertain ones. Twenty languages, all on device; every model, English included, downloads on first use and stays cached.
Compare PDFs
Page navigation, zoom and scrolling stay synchronized. Difference regions are marked directly over the pages, with a changed percentage for each pair. The results also identify different page dimensions and pages that exist in only one document. You can export the comparison report without changing either source PDF.
View & navigate
The KillerPDF.Engine rendering with four view modes - single page, continuous scroll, two-page with optional book layout, and a grid of every page. Open several PDFs in tabs, with search, outlines, and clickable links.
Organize pages
Merge PDFs and extract pages, drag to reorder, rotate, reverse, fix the orientation of scans, straighten them and divide spreads. Edit bookmarks, attachments, layers and page labels, generate a table of contents, and drop a folder or .zip to merge everything inside.
Search & select text
Search the whole document with every result highlighted as you scroll. Text selection follows columns and reading order, so copying one column no longer pulls in the next.
Search Tools
Press Ctrl+K and type what you want to do. Every tool and command is listed by name with its shortcut, in English and in the interface language, and Enter runs it. Shortcuts are customizable and every tool is one letter.
Transform
Rotate, scale, flip, straighten with a level line, correct perspective, tune levels, and fix exposure, saturation and white balance, all with a live preview, while annotations follow the page.
Measure
Calibrated distance, perimeter, area and angle with snapping, nine units and a drawing scale per page or document. Measurements save as standard PDF annotations, so other viewers show them too, and a report lists them as CSV or JSON.
Print & flatten
A real in-app print preview with printer paper and source controls, collapsible layout and output sections, scale, margins, N-up, subsets, duplex, and live preparation and spool progress at 300 DPI. Or flatten or export pages as images.
Review & repair
A preflight report with confirmed corrections, an accessibility review with guided repairs and Undo, print production and separations reports, a navigation audit that repairs bad links, and Reduce File Size for a smaller copy.
Production tools
Headers, footers, page numbers and continuous Bates numbering across a batch of files; N-up, booklet, step and repeat, cut and stack, manual and poster layouts with printer's marks, previewed before they are saved.
Split pane
F10 shows two documents side by side in one window, sharing the same toolbar and sidebar while keeping independent view and invert settings. Drag a tab from one pane to the other, and F10 again closes the split.
Automation & command line
Sixty-six commands from PowerShell or cmd with no window: merge, split, redact, protect, sign, export, OCR, print, impose, data merge and more, each with a script-friendly exit code and JSON reports where it counts. Passwords can arrive on standard input.
Guided tasks & macros
Prepare a PDF for email, clean up a scan, remove sensitive information or create a fillable form through reviewed steps. Save compatible tasks as macros, run them on a stack of files or an automatic folder, and merge CSV, JSON or XLSX data into forms.
Stamps & watermarks
Stamp page numbers or a text watermark across any page range - positioned, sized, and styled - applied as a single undo.
Open & repair PDFs
Opens password-protected PDFs by prompting instead of erroring, and repairs damaged or broken-xref files so they open and print.
Document info
View and edit a PDF's title, author, subject, keywords, and creator metadata, saved back into the file.
Install or run portable
Drop the exe anywhere and run it, or use the built-in installer - per-user with no admin rights, or for everyone on the computer (needs an administrator). You can also grab it from the command line:winget install killerpdf
Themes & languages
Thirteen themes - Dark, Light, Black, 98SE, Blood, Greed, Cyanotic, Ectoplasm, Decay, Malaise, Sepulchre, Delirium and Mourning - all switchable live. Four of them - Dark, Light, Black and 98SE - each take one of eight accent colors, so 41 looks in all. UI localized in twenty languages, including Vietnamese, Kazakh, Polish, Hungarian and Russian.
The.Engine
KillerPDF 1.9 completes the move it began in 1.8. The KillerPDF.Engine, an independent .NET library built from scratch for PDF 2.0 and modern PDF/A, now renders every page and extracts, searches and selects every word, as well as reading, validating, creating, editing, signing, encrypting and writing the file, through the same public API available to other applications. PDFium, Docnet.Core and PdfPig are gone.
Explore the engine and developer guide
TheCorpus
The KillerPDF Corpus is an open, versioned collection of real-world, standards, malformed, and deliberately stressful PDFs. It makes reliability measurable and gives KillerPDF, qpdf, and other PDF tools the same repeatable test inputs.
Explore the latest results and benchmark guide