GlyphPDF v1.3.1 — 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-1.3.1-x64.msi | Double-click → Next → Finish. Adds Start-menu & desktop shortcuts and a "PDF Document — GlyphPDF" Open-With entry. |
| Portable (no install) | GlyphPDF-1.3.1-x64-portable.zip | Unzip anywhere — including a USB stick — and run GlyphPDF.exe. Nothing is written to the registry. |
Coming soon: winget install Glyph.GlyphPDF (pending Microsoft review).
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-1.3.1-x64.msi -Algorithm SHA256
Features
Document Editing
- Text editing with inline support
- Full annotation suite (highlights, underlines, notes, stamps, shapes, pencil)
- Forms: text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns, date/numeric/calculated fields
- Page operations: rotate, crop, resize, reorder, insert, extract, split
- Headers, footers, page numbers, Bates numbering
- Text and image watermarks
Security
- AES-256 password encryption
- Certificate-based encryption (multi-recipient)
- PAdES B-LT/B-LTA digital signatures with DSS/VRI
- Secure redaction (content stream excision, never black rectangles)
- Document sanitization (15+ vectors)
- SHA-256 only for signature hashing
OCR
- Tesseract and RapidOCR PP-OCRv5 engines
- Preprocessing pipeline
- ROVER word-level multi-engine merge
Conversion & Batch
- PDF to HTML, images, CSV, text
- Batch processing with inline error reporting
- 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
- Ribbon toolbar with 7 controllers (Home, View, Edit, Pages, Convert, Forms, Security)
- Dark, Light, and High Contrast themes
- 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 v1.0 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
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, annotationsRenderCache — PDFium-backed 3-tier LRU cache (256 MB, tiled rendering, prefetch)SignatureManager — PAdES signing, validation, TSAUpdateChecker — Async manifest-based auto-update with SHA-256 verification
Dependencies: PoDoFo, PDFium, qpdf, OpenSSL, Tesseract, Leptonica, LibXml2, Freetype, Zlib — all via MSYS2 ucrt64 pacman (except PDFium prebuilt + ONNX Runtime bundled)
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)
> 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.
Build (Windows + MSYS2)
Open the MSYS2 UCRT64 shell (C:\msys64\ucrt64.exe) or any shell with C:\msys64\ucrt64\bin on PATH:
cd /c/Users/User/Projects/pdf
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 C:\Users\User\Projects\pdf
cmake -B build -G "Ninja"
cmake --build build --parallel 8
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).
Testing
set QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreen
cd build
ctest --output-on-failure
14 test targets:
| Target | Category | What it tests |
|---|
| UnitTests | Unit | Core utility validation |
| TestInterfaces | Unit | Engine API contracts |
| SmokeTest | Integration | End-to-end load/save/modify |
| TestSanitization | Security | Metadata stripping vectors |
| TestSignatureValidation | Security | Byte-range and trust validation |
| TestRedaction | Security | Content stream excision, XObject redaction |
| TestThreadSafety | Concurrency | Mutex validation under concurrent access |
| TestEncryption | Security | AES-256 generation and enforcement |
| TestResourceLimits | Resilience | Page/buffer size boundaries |
| TestControllers | UI | Controller action dispatch |
| TestIntegration | E2E | Full workflow: open, edit, save, encrypt, rotate, redact |
| TestPerformance | Benchmark | Open/save timing, metadata ops, error overhead |
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 v1.3.1 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.