[Open Source] Qudo PDF Toolbox - Offline, Fully Local Desktop PDF Toolkit
Project Introduction
Qudo PDF Tools (qudo-pdf-tools) is an offline, fully local desktop PDF toolkit. It runs as a standalone Windows desktop application, with all processing performed on the local machine—no server-side components, no internet connection, and no telemetry data collection. Files never leave the device from start to finish. It is more than just a format-conversion utility; it is a desktop application capable of genuine PDF editing. Inserted text and images are floating elements that can be dragged, resized, and double-clicked to modify their content. Existing text, text blocks, and images on the page can also be directly clicked to edit text or dragged to new positions. The interface supports real-time switching between Chinese and English.
Open Source License
AGPL-3.0 License (dependent components include PyMuPDF and pdf2docx. Free for personal and open-source use without restrictions; for closed-source commercial distribution, a commercial PyMuPDF license must be purchased and AGPL dependencies removed.)
Interface Showcase
After opening, all tools are grouped by scenario and listed on the left side or at the top. The operation logic is uniformly "select file → set parameters → view output."
Feature Overview
Powerful page processing: Merge (page ranges can be specified for each file), split (by range / every N pages / per page / into N equal parts / odd-even pages / extract selected pages, with ZIP packaging option), page organization (drag-and-drop reordering, rotation, duplication, deletion, insertion of blank pages, insertion of pages from other PDFs), rotate, crop and automatic white margin removal, image to PDF, PDF to image, and create new blank PDF.
Format conversion: PDF to Word (can generate editable documents with tables preserved, or export as plain text or full-page images with layout preserved), PDF to Excel (automatically recognizes table borders and alignment structures, exports editable cells, supports XLSX / CSV).
Extraction and privacy: Extract text (browse by page, search within results, export as TXT / Markdown / JSON / HTML), extract images, metadata cleaning (item-by-item inspection and cleanup of Info, XMP, attachments, JavaScript, fonts, form fields, etc., with up to 16 cleaning toggles and a cleaning report generated).
Editing and annotation: Add watermark (text / logo, nine-grid positioning, tiled offset, transparency, Chinese character support), add page numbers (various numbering formats, odd-even mirroring, header/footer sections), content editing, fill and sign (handwritten signature pad, typed signature, uploaded signature with automatic white background removal, automatic form field detection and filling), annotation markup (highlight, underline, strikethrough, freehand drawing, sticky note, stamp, rectangle, arrow, etc., all as genuine PDF annotation objects).
Security and file size: Redact (supports box selection, text line snapping, keyword search, built-in regex templates for sensitive information such as email addresses / phone numbers / ID numbers / bank card numbers / IP addresses / URLs / passport numbers / license plate numbers, with full-page rasterization option; permanently deletes content in redacted areas rather than covering with black blocks), compress (four levels: lossless / balanced / strong / extreme), encrypt (AES-256 / AES-128 / RC4, with open password and eight permission settings), batch decrypt.
Tech Stack
UI layer: Desktop GUI built with PySide6 (Qt), supporting Chinese-English bilingual switching.
Core engine: PyMuPDF for page parsing, rendering, and content editing; PDF to Word conversion relies on pdf2docx.
Runtime environment: Python 3.10+ (developed on Python 3.13), Windows 10 / 11.
Packaging: One-click packaging into a single-file executable (approximately 130MB QudoPDF.exe) via PyInstaller configuration (QudoPDF.spec), ready to run with a double-click, fully functional offline.
Deployment
There are two ways to use it.
1. Run source code directly: Prepare a Python 3.10+ environment, download the repository, install dependencies, and then run the entry script (you can also append a PDF file path to the command to open that file directly).
2. Package into a single-file exe: Use the project's built-in PyInstaller configuration to package. The output is a standalone executable, suitable for long-term daily use on a work machine.
Known Limitations
The project does not include OCR; scanned image-based PDFs require prior text recognition before text extraction or conversion to editable Word. Existing text and images on a page can be moved, edited, or deleted, but cannot be scaled or rotated as a whole (newly inserted floating elements can). Editing or inserting text will rewrite it using standard / system fonts, so typographic details may differ slightly from the original embedded fonts. Vector graphics do not currently support moving as a whole.

good tools
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