KillerPDF

Portable PDF editor for field techs. View, annotate, merge, split, edit text, draw, sign, and print without an Adobe subscription or a phone-home. Single Windows EXE, ~6 MB zipped, no runtime install required.

Part of killertools.net.

Features

• High-quality rendering via PDFium (Docnet.Core)
• Merge multiple PDFs and split out selected pages, drag-and-drop page reordering
• Inline text editing with font matching against the original document
• Text boxes, freehand drawing, and highlight overlays with adjustable color, size, and opacity
• Draw and save reusable signatures, click to place anywhere on a page
• Full-text search with result highlighting, drag-select to copy text
• Print with annotations flattened into the output
• No installer, no runtime install, no admin rights, no config files, no account

Screenshots

Requirements

• Windows 10 or 11 (x64)
• No runtime install. Everything needed is inside the EXE (targets .NET Framework 4.8, which ships with every supported Windows release).

Download

• Prebuilt binary:
• Source (GPL3 corresponding source for this release):

Build from source

git clone 
cd KillerPDF
dotnet publish -c Release

Output lands in bin/Release/net48/publish/. The publish step produces a single Costura-bundled KillerPDF.exe plus a versioned KillerPDF--src.zip for GPL3 source distribution.

Requires the .NET 8 SDK or later to build (even though the output targets .NET Framework 4.8).

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md.

Why this exists

I hate Adobe. Acrobat is bloated, tries to hijack file associations, wants a subscription to do basic things, and phones home constantly. Most of the "free" alternatives are either ad-riddled, cloud-based, or rebrands of the same PDF engine sold under three different names.

KillerPDF is what I wanted: local-only, portable, no account, no telemetry. The PDF equivalent of Notepad.

License

GPLv3. See LICENSE. If you fork, modify, or redistribute KillerPDF, your version must also be released under GPLv3 with source available. No exceptions for commercial rebrands.