GlyphPDF v1.5.0 — Professional PDF Workstation

A high-performance desktop PDF editor built with C++17 and Qt 6. Designed for professional environments with a focus on precision, security, and direct document manipulation — with no telemetry, no subscription, and no cloud dependency.

Install

You need nothing but the app itself. No MSYS2, no Qt, no compilers, no runtime to install separately — every dependency (Qt 6, the PDF/OCR engines, the C++ and Visual C++ runtimes, the OCR models) is bundled inside the download. Just get it and run it.

Option	Download	How to run
Installer (recommended)	`GlyphPDF-1.5.0-x64.msi`	Double-click → Next → Finish. Adds Start-menu & desktop shortcuts and a "PDF Document — GlyphPDF" Open-With entry.
Portable (no install)	`GlyphPDF-1.5.0-x64-portable.zip`	Unzip anywhere — including a USB stick — and run `GlyphPDF.exe`. Nothing is written to the registry.

A winget package (Glyph.GlyphPDF) will follow once releases are code-signed.

System requirements: Windows 10 (version 1607+) or Windows 11, 64-bit. 4 GB RAM recommended for OCR on large documents. That's the entire list.

Every release is published with a .sha256 file so you can verify the download integrity:

Get-FileHash .\GlyphPDF-1.5.0-x64.msi -Algorithm SHA256

Features

Document Editing

Text editing with inline support, including letter spacing, line spacing and opacity
Image move, resize, rotate by angle, restack and opacity, written into the PDF
Full annotation suite (highlights, underlines, notes, stamps, shapes, pencil)
Forms: text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns, date/numeric/calculated fields
Form scripts: AcroForm Calculate, Format, Keystroke and Validate scripts run in a sandboxed JavaScript runtime (quickjs-ng) with a CPU deadline
Page operations: rotate, crop, resize, reorder, insert, extract, split
Headers, footers, page numbers, Bates numbering
Text and image watermarks

Security & Signing

AES-256 password encryption
Certificate-based encryption (multi-recipient, with a recipient picker)
PAdES B-LT/B-LTA digital signatures with DSS/VRI, a certify selector and visible signature appearances
Signature picker: Draw, Type or Upload (each saved as a real PDF annotation)
Prepare signing requests for other signers (Protect ▸ Sign ▸ Prepare Request)
Secure redaction (content stream excision, never black rectangles), with a proof step that refuses to certify what it cannot verify
Document sanitization (15+ vectors)
SHA-256 only for signature hashing
Machine policy for administrators: managed settings are always shown as "Managed by policy"

OCR

Tesseract and RapidOCR PP-OCRv5 engines
Preprocessing pipeline (deskew, binarize, denoise)
ROVER word-level multi-engine merge
Word-level review before accepting OCR text

Accessibility

Accessibility checker with jump-to-issue rows (including reading order)
Tag Document: builds a structure tree for untagged documents while preserving images and marked content

Review & Compare

Comments filter, table view and CSV export
Printable review summary: comments grouped by page, with status and totals
Document comparison with page alignment and change-type filters

Conversion & Batch

PDF to Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx, real table columns), HTML, images, CSV, text
Batch processing with inline error reporting
Batch presets: Bates numbering, rename on conflict, stop on failure, import/export, per-step size report, hot-folder ingest, and a multi-step preset editor
Export presets (High Quality PDF/A, Web Optimized, Legal Archive)

Print & Export

Print preview with page setup (paper size, orientation, margins, scaling)
Export presets panel with create/edit/delete support

UI

Task-organized ribbon (Home, View, Edit, Pages, Comment, Review, Convert, Forms, Protect and more)
Single, Continuous and Two-Page layouts; Presentation and Full Screen
Dark, Light, and High Contrast themes; Eye Care and Night Mode reading modes
Right-to-left layout option
Drag-and-drop PDF opening
Recent files (max 20)
AI Chat panel (local Ollama only — no document content leaves the machine)
Find & Replace with redact-all option
Full keyboard accessibility (F6 region cycling, F1 help)

Localization

GlyphPDF ships in English. Arabic, French, and German translations are planned for a future release (translation scaffolding — 1394 strings each — is in place; human-translated packages are pending commissioning).

Auto-Update

JSON manifest-based update checker
SHA-256 verified downloads
User consent required at every stage
Dormant until a code-signed release ships: the updater refuses unsigned installers by design

Technical Architecture

pdfws_core (interfaces, ToolId, AppContext, commands base)
    pdfws_engines (PoDoFo, PDFium, qpdf, OCR, conversion)
        pdfws_commands (undo commands)
            pdfws_ui (MainWindow, controllers, modes, ribbon, dialogs)
                PdfWorkstation (main.cpp + Bootstrapper)

Framework: Qt 6.11.x (Core, Gui, Widgets, Pdf, PdfWidgets, PrintSupport, Svg, Network, Concurrent, Test) — installed via MSYS2 ucrt64 pacman

Engines:

PdfEditorEngine — PoDoFo integration for structure manipulation, encryption, annotations
RenderCache — PDFium-backed 3-tier LRU cache (256 MB, tiled rendering, prefetch)
SignatureManager — PAdES signing, validation, TSA
UpdateChecker — Async manifest-based auto-update with SHA-256 verification

Dependencies: PoDoFo, PDFium, qpdf, quickjs-ng, OpenSSL, Tesseract, Leptonica, LibXml2, Freetype, Zlib — all via MSYS2 ucrt64 pacman (except PDFium prebuilt + ONNX Runtime bundled). quickjs-ng (mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-quickjs-ng, MIT) powers run-side AcroForm Calculate/Format script execution; when absent the build stays green and the capability is disclosed honestly via CapabilityRegistry. The runtime links libqjs-0.dll — shipped beside the executable like the other MSYS2 runtime DLLs.

Building from Source (Developers only)

End users: skip this entire section. Everything below is for compiling GlyphPDF from source. If you just want to use the app, see Install above — the released MSI and portable ZIP already contain every dependency listed here. Nothing in this section is something a user ever installs.

Prerequisites (build-time toolchain)

MSYS2 installed at C:\msys64\ (https://www.msys2.org/)

MSYS2 ucrt64 environment with the following packages installed via pacman:

pacman -Syu --noconfirm
pacman -S --noconfirm --needed \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-toolchain \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-cmake \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-ninja \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-pkgconf \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-qt6-base \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-qt6-tools \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-qt6-svg \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-qt6-translations \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-qt6-imageformats \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-qt6-pdf \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-podofo \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-qpdf \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-quickjs-ng \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-openssl \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-tesseract-ocr \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-tesseract-data-eng \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-leptonica \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-libxml2 \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-freetype \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-zlib \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-curl \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-libpng \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-libjpeg-turbo \
    mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-libtiff

Note: We use the ucrt64 environment (not mingw64) because qt6-pdf (required for the PDF viewer) is only packaged for ucrt64. UCRT is the modern Universal C Runtime, system-native on all Windows 10+ installs.

Vendored binary dependencies (required)

Three untracked binary trees must exist before configuring; a fresh clone or worktree does not have them:

Tree	What	How staged
`third_party/podofo/install/`	PoDoFo 1.1.0 (DLL + CMake config) built from source with the ucrt64 toolchain	bootstrap script or CI builds it from the 1.1.0 tag
`third_party/pdfium/bin/pdfium.dll`	PDFium runtime, chromium/7834 (checksum-pinned; matches the vendored import lib - see `third_party/pdfium/PROVENANCE.md`)	downloaded
`onnxruntime-win-x64-1.17.3/`	ONNX Runtime 1.17.3 (secondary OCR, `HAS_RAPIDOCR`)	downloaded

One command provisions (or checks) all three:

scripts/bootstrap-vendor-deps.sh check     # verify
scripts/bootstrap-vendor-deps.sh           # install what is missing

Warning: without third_party/podofo/install, CMake silently falls back to MSYS2's podofo 0.10.4, which is API-incompatible with this source, and the test binaries then fail with 0xc0000135 (missing DLLs). The configure log now warns loudly about the substitution and release configurations (-DGLYPHPDF_RELEASE_BUILD=ON) hard-fail instead. The CI workflows (.github/workflows/ci.yml, release.yml) run the same pinned steps on a cache miss.

Build (Windows + MSYS2)

Open the MSYS2 UCRT64 shell (C:\msys64\ucrt64.exe) or any shell with C:\msys64\ucrt64\bin on PATH:

cd glyph-pdf            # your clone
mkdir -p build && cd build
cmake .. -G "Ninja"
cmake --build . --parallel 8

Or from PowerShell with MSYS2 ucrt64 on PATH:

$env:PATH = 'C:\msys64\ucrt64\bin;' + $env:PATH
cd glyph-pdf            # your clone
cmake -B build -G "Ninja"
cmake --build build --parallel 8

Git Bash users: put C:\msys64\ucrt64\bin first on PATH. Git for Windows ships its own older zlib1.dll / libstdc++-6.dll in /mingw64/bin; if that directory comes first, Qt's rcc fails during configure with 0xc0000139 (entry point not found).

Optional external tools (two features)

Two optional features use external programs. Both are detected at runtime — the app finds them automatically if they're on the machine (bundled alongside GlyphPDF, on the PATH, in Program Files, or in the registry), with no configuration. Both degrade gracefully: the app runs fine without them and offers a one-click download when you first use the feature.

Feature	External tool	How it's found	Without it
PDF/A conformance validation	veraPDF (AGPL-3.0, subprocess only)	bundled `verapdf/`, `GLYPHPDF_VERAPDF` env var, or PATH	In-app prompt to download veraPDF
Office → PDF import (`.docx`, `.xlsx`, `.pptx`, `.odt`)	LibreOffice (`soffice`)	bundled `libreoffice/`, PATH, Program Files, or registry	In-app prompt to download LibreOffice

Neither is bundled in the default installer (veraPDF ships its own ~150 MB Java runtime; LibreOffice is ~400 MB). To bundle veraPDF anyway, drop its CLI tree at third_party/verapdf/ before running packaging/build-msi.bat — deploy.ps1 stages it and the app auto-detects it.

Why MSYS2 ucrt64?

GlyphPDF migrated from a hybrid Qt-installer + vcpkg setup to fully MSYS2-native in v1.0.0 development. This eliminates the libstdc++/libwinpthread ABI mismatch that previously required carefully-chosen DLL mixes in the build directory. Single coherent toolchain (GCC 16.x + Qt 6.11 + all deps from pacman), single source of truth for dependency versions, easier maintenance via pacman -Syu.

Building the installer + portable ZIP

To produce the distributable artifacts yourself (the same ones on the Releases page):

cd packaging
build-msi.bat

This runs the full pipeline — compile → deploy.ps1 (stages every runtime DLL, the VC++ runtime, ONNX models and tessdata into a self-contained tree) → WiX MSI and portable ZIP, each with a SHA-256 checksum, written to dist/. The MSI registers .pdf file associations via OpenWithProgids (it does not hijack the default handler).

Two prerequisites the repository cannot provide:

The OCR models (models/ppocrv5/, models/pp_doclayout/) are not in the repository, and deploy.ps1 refuses to stage a payload without them.
A code-signing certificate. The pipeline signs the EXE and the MSI and has a hard publish gate. build-msi.ps1 -SkipSigning produces a local test build only; such artifacts must never be published.

Testing

set QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreen
cd build
ctest --output-on-failure -j6

The suite has 189 registered CTest suites: 188 run, and one probe is deliberately disabled. They cover:

the PDF engines;
save and recovery safety;
redaction and its proofs;
signatures and certificate encryption;
form scripts;
accessibility tagging;
OCR;
conversion;
batch presets;
the UI, including TestViewParity, which characterizes every view mode of the current interface.

Every test gets its own temporary directory, so parallel runs (-j) don't share temp state. Filter by label to run a subset, for example ctest -L security or ctest -L redaction. Suites that need the (untracked) OCR models skip themselves when the models are absent.

Run directly from Git Bash, a test executable may print nothing to the console. Use TestName.exe -o result.txt,txt to capture its QtTest output.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+O	Open document
Ctrl+S	Save
Ctrl+Shift+S	Save As
Ctrl+P	Print
Ctrl+F	Find
Ctrl+H	Find & Replace
Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y	Undo / Redo
Ctrl+,	Preferences
F1	Keyboard shortcuts help
F6 / Shift+F6	Cycle / reverse-cycle UI regions
F11	Full screen
Alt+Left / Alt+Right	Navigate back / forward
Ctrl+0	Actual size
Ctrl++ / Ctrl+-	Zoom in / out

Architecture

GlyphPDF v1.5.0 is publicly released (Apache-2.0). The architecture integrates three workstreams committed per ROADMAP.md:

Dual-Model Core — Structural model (PDF object graph owned by PoDoFo + PDFium + qpdf — source of truth for sign/redact/forms/exact layout) ↔ Semantic model (docmodel::SemanticDocument — editing/interchange model). LuaDjotCodec encodes a SemanticDocument to Djot and decodes Djot back into a SemanticDocument by walking the vendored reference parser's AST. The round-trip is structure-preserving for the document's section tree — section nesting, titles, paragraph/list text, and inline emphasis/strong/code round-trip exactly (verified by TestDjotRoundtrip::testStructuralRoundtrip and per-seed section-count equality in TestDjotFuzz). It is not yet a byte-exact round-trip for every block construct: standalone heading blocks are promoted to sections on reparse and empty code blocks are dropped, so top-level block counts are not guaranteed to match (the decode never invents content — decoded block count ≤ original). Semantic ↔ PDF is EXPLICITLY LOSSY both ways and is gated: applySemanticToPdf requires a ProvenanceToken that only ProvenanceGuard::mintApplyToken can mint (compile-time chokepoint), and the guard refuses Djot-edit-save-back for signed documents.
Heterogeneous LaneScheduler — GPU lane (warm persistent worker, never spawn-per-page) + CPU lane (QtConcurrent, core-count) + cross-page pipelining (layout(P+1) ‖ ocr(P) ‖ fusion(P-1)). Reused by: OCR ensemble, MRC compression pipeline, future GPU workloads.
Parallel Layout + OCR Ensemble (WS1) — PP-DocLayoutV2 layout detector (+ Surya when license permits) with IoU reconciliation → per-region Tesseract + RapidOCR PP-OCRv5 fanout via LaneScheduler → word-level confidence-weighted ROVER fusion. Per-region redo + per-word confidence overlay in OCRMode.
Djot Full Document Interchange (WS2) — docmodel + pdfws_djot libraries; vendored Lua 5.4 reference parser (MIT); three roles: (a) OCR output mapping to SemanticDocument, (b) authoring input (Djot → Semantic → PoDoFo content stream), (c) annotation/comment rich text (Djot internal model, transcoded to /RC XHTML + /Contents plain text on save, original stashed in /PieceInfo for perfect GlyphPDF round-trip with Acrobat/Foxit interop).
MRC Layered Compression in PDF/A (WS3) ✅ — Layout-region-guided mask separation (MrcPageProcessor) → JBIG2 lossless foreground (jbig2enc Apache-2.0; NEVER pattern-matching per 2013 Xerox incident) + JPEG2000 background (OpenJPEG 2.5.4 BSD-2, already in MSYS2) + invisible 3 Tr OCR sandwich text from WS1 word boxes → PDF/A-2b assembly with XMP metadata + sRGB OutputIntent → veraPDF subprocess validation gate. Achieved: 30.4× compression (86 KB vs 2.64 MB raw pixels on A4 test page). Off/Lossless/Balanced/Aggressive modes in CompressDialog. Optional DjVu importer (HAS_DJVU=OFF default; import-only, no DjVu output).

              ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
              │  Application Layer (GpMainWindow + Ribbon)     │
              └──────────────────────┬─────────────────────────┘
                                     │
              ┌──────────────────────▼─────────────────────────┐
              │             Dual-Model Core                    │
              │  Structural (PDF object graph)  │  Semantic    │
              │  PoDoFo / PDFium / qpdf         │  docmodel    │
              │  ProvenanceGuard ◄── boundary ──► pdfws_djot   │
              └──────────────────────┬─────────────────────────┘
                                     │
              ┌──────────────────────▼─────────────────────────┐
              │       Heterogeneous LaneScheduler              │
              │  GPU lane (warm worker)  │  CPU lane (pool)    │
              │  Cross-page pipeline: layout ‖ ocr ‖ fusion    │
              └──────────────────────┬─────────────────────────┘
                                     │
              ┌──────────────────────▼─────────────────────────┐
              │  OCR Ensemble (WS1)  │  MRC Pipeline (WS3)     │
              │  Layout+OCR fanout   │  JBIG2 + JP2K + Sandwich│
              └────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

FORBIDDEN: MuPDF (AGPL-3.0), Poppler (GPL-2.0+), DjVu output, veraPDF in-process linking.

License

GlyphPDF is open source under Apache-2.0.

Architectural constraints (per ROADMAP "Forbidden Dependencies"):

MuPDF (AGPL-3.0): Never linked in-process — CMake FATAL_ERROR guard enforces.
Poppler (GPL-2.0+): Never linked in-process — CMake FATAL_ERROR guard enforces.
DjVu: Excluded as output format (legacy; minimally maintained). Optional importer only for legacy corpus ingestion.
veraPDF (AGPL-3.0): Subprocess only, never linked in-process (used for PDF/A conformance validation).

All third-party dependencies are documented in LICENSE-3RD-PARTY.md.

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
.context		.context
.github		.github
cmake		cmake
docs		docs
fuzz		fuzz
marketing		marketing
models		models
packaging		packaging
resources		resources
scripts		scripts
src		src
tests		tests
third_party		third_party
tools		tools
translations		translations
.gitattributes		.gitattributes
.gitignore		.gitignore
.graphifyignore		.graphifyignore
CHANGELOG.md		CHANGELOG.md
CMakeLists.txt		CMakeLists.txt
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md		CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
CONTRIBUTING.md		CONTRIBUTING.md
LICENSE		LICENSE
LICENSE-3RD-PARTY.md		LICENSE-3RD-PARTY.md
PRD.md		PRD.md
README.md		README.md
ROADMAP.md		ROADMAP.md
build_all.bat		build_all.bat
resources.qrc		resources.qrc

Navigation Menu

Repository navigation

About

Repository files navigation

GlyphPDF v1.5.0 — Professional PDF Workstation

Install

Features

Document Editing

Security & Signing

OCR

Accessibility

Review & Compare

Conversion & Batch

Print & Export

UI

Localization

Auto-Update

Technical Architecture

Building from Source (Developers only)

Prerequisites (build-time toolchain)

Vendored binary dependencies (required)

Build (Windows + MSYS2)

Optional external tools (two features)

Why MSYS2 ucrt64?

Building the installer + portable ZIP

Testing

Keyboard Shortcuts

Architecture

License

About

Releases

Packages

Used by

Contributors

Languages

Latest commit

History

Folders and files

Repository files navigation

GlyphPDF v1.5.0 — Professional PDF Workstation

Install

Features

Document Editing

Security & Signing

OCR

Accessibility

Review & Compare

Conversion & Batch

Print & Export

UI

Localization

Auto-Update

Technical Architecture

Building from Source (Developers only)

Prerequisites (build-time toolchain)

Vendored binary dependencies (required)

Build (Windows + MSYS2)

Optional external tools (two features)

Why MSYS2 ucrt64?

Building the installer + portable ZIP

Testing

Keyboard Shortcuts

Architecture

License

About

Resources

Code of conduct

Contributing

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Releases

Packages

Used by

Contributors

Languages