This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/opensource by /u/smilaise on 2026-06-14 22:38:16+00:00.
I am Steve the Killer and I created KillerPDF, a free GPLv3 PDF editor for Windows. No account, no subscription, no telemetry, nothing phones home. It is a single portable EXE that runs off a USB stick, or a per-user install with no UAC prompt.
Posting here specifically because the last two releases were shaped almost entirely by people who pulled the source, filed issues, and sent PRs. That is the whole reason I keep it open.
What is new across 1.5.0 and 1.5.1 (I shipped .1 about two hours after .0 because releasing to real users is apparently my QA process now):
Open source / community
- Traditional Chinese localization landed from a contributor PR. The UI is now English, Spanish, and Traditional Chinese, with a TRANSLATING.md guide so another language is just a PR away.
- A GPLv3 source bundle is generated on every build, so the exact source for a given binary ships with it.
- Someone reproduced an “Unexpected EOF” open failure down to a 15-byte zlib blob. Best bug report I have ever gotten. Fixed.
View / UI
- Four view modes: single, continuous scroll, two-page, and a grid of every page
- A print dialog with a real print preview, since Windows’ own dialog refuses to preview
- Six live-switchable themes: Dark, Light, High Contrast, Blood, Greed, Cyanotic
- Per-monitor DPI v2 support, so the window and its custom chrome scale correctly when you drag between monitors with different scaling instead of rendering at the wrong size
Editing
- Inline text editing with font matching, double-click placed text to re-edit
- Highlights, freehand, text boxes, reusable signatures, drop images onto pages
- Crop tool with a coordinate editor and page-range apply
- Merge, split, reorder, rotate, extract pages
- Form filling, bookmark and outline nav, full-text search
Security / Performance
- The bundled PDFium native DLL is SHA256-verified at startup. If it has been swapped or tampered with, the app refuses to run.
- Updates are gated on Authenticode signature checks with downgrade protection, so a planted EXE in your Downloads folder cannot quietly replace your installed one.
- Decrypted copies of password-protected PDFs are written to a per-user app-data folder instead of the shared temp directory, and temp files are cleaned up on close, crash, and next startup.
- The running EXE’s SHA256 is shown in the About dialog so you can verify your build against the published release.
- Multi-core Save Flattened, large docs flatten much faster
- Fixed a class of PDFs that would not open (a strict Flate inflater choking on multi-revision files, now recovered losslessly through PDFium)
Source (GPLv3): github.com/SteveTheKiller/KillerPDF
Build: pdf.killertools.net
Issues and PRs very welcome. Going by 1.5.1, I clearly need them.