PDFMaster

1. Overview & Key Features

PDFMaster is a complete local PDF editor and document utility toolkit designed to replace expensive subscription tools like Adobe Acrobat Pro. Everything runs on your machine — no cloud uploads, no accounts, no fees, no internet connection required after installation. It is built around PyMuPDF (fitz) for high-performance PDF rendering and manipulation, and Pillow for image conversion workflows.

Whether you need to quickly merge a dozen reports, split a scanned book into individual chapters, add a password to a sensitive document, or extract text from a scanned invoice using OCR, PDFMaster covers the complete PDF workflow that most professionals need every day.

Key Features

• Merge: Combine multiple PDF files into one in any order. Supports drag-and-drop reordering before merge.
• Split: Extract specific page ranges from a PDF into separate files, or split every page into its own document.
• Rotate & Reorder: Rotate individual pages by 90°/180°/270°, or drag pages into a new order using the visual page panel.
• Compress: Reduce file size by re-encoding embedded images and removing unused streams. Choose from three quality presets.
• OCR: Extract searchable text from scanned PDF pages using Tesseract OCR. Outputs editable text or creates a text-layer PDF.
• Convert: Export PDF pages as high-resolution images (JPEG, PNG, TIFF). Convert image files or folders of images into a multi-page PDF.
• Password Protection: Add 128-bit or 256-bit AES encryption to any PDF. Set separate owner and user passwords with granular permission control.
• Metadata Editing: View and edit PDF document properties — title, author, subject, keywords, creator, and creation date.
• Page-level Preview: Every page is rendered as a thumbnail in the page queue, letting you visually confirm operations before committing.

2. System Requirements & Installation

Installing from Source

1. Navigate to the PDFMaster folder.
2. Activate the virtual environment: .venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
3. Install requirements: pip install -r requirements.txt
4. Launch: python main.py

Key dependencies: PyQt6, PyMuPDF (fitz), Pillow, pytesseract (for OCR). Tesseract OCR engine must be installed separately for OCR features — download from github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract and ensure it is in your PATH.

3. Interface Overview

PDFMaster opens to a main window with a splitter layout. The left side contains the File Queue — a list widget showing all loaded PDF files by name. The right side shows the Page Preview Panel — thumbnail previews of pages from the selected file. Below the queue is the Operation Panel with tabs for each available operation. A status bar at the bottom shows operation results and progress.

Loading Files

Click Add Files (or drag and drop PDFs from Windows Explorer) to populate the queue. Multiple files can be added at once. Each file shows its filename in the queue. Click a file in the queue to see its page thumbnails in the preview panel. Right-click a file for options: Open in System Viewer, Remove from Queue, or Show in Explorer.

Keyboard Shortcuts

4. Merge PDFs

The Merge function combines multiple PDF files into a single output PDF in the order you specify.

How to Merge

1. Add all PDFs you want to merge to the file queue using Add Files.
2. Reorder the files using the Move Up / Move Down buttons in the queue, or drag and drop them into the desired order. The merged PDF will follow the order shown in the queue from top to bottom.
3. Switch to the Merge tab in the Operation Panel.
4. Optionally enable Preserve Bookmarks to carry over any table-of-contents bookmarks from the source PDFs into the merged output. Bookmarks from each source file are nested under a heading named after their source filename.
5. Click Merge Selected. A file save dialog opens. Choose the output filename and location and click Save.
6. PDFMaster writes the merged PDF and displays the output path and total page count in the status bar.

Selective Page Merging

You can merge specific page ranges from each source file rather than entire files. After adding files to the queue, click any file and set its page range in the Page Range field that appears below the queue (see Section 12 for page range syntax). When page ranges are set, only the specified pages from each file are included in the merge output.

5. Split PDFs

The Split function extracts pages from a PDF into separate output files.

Split Modes

• Split by Page Range: Extract a specific range of pages as a new PDF. For example, extract pages 1–10 as one file and pages 11–20 as another. You can define multiple output ranges from the same source file in one operation.
• Split Every Page: Each page becomes its own individual PDF file. Useful for splitting scanned books or archives where each page is a distinct document. Output files are named sequentially (source_page_001.pdf, source_page_002.pdf, etc.).
• Split by Fixed Interval: Split the PDF into chunks of N pages each. For example, split a 90-page PDF into 30-page chunks of 3 files.

How to Split

1. Add the source PDF to the queue and select it.
2. Switch to the Split tab in the Operation Panel.
3. Choose a split mode and configure the parameters.
4. Set an Output Folder — all output files are written to this directory.
5. Click Split. Progress is shown in the status bar. When complete, a summary lists all output files created.

6. Rotate & Reorder Pages

Use the Rotate & Reorder tab to fix incorrectly oriented pages or rearrange the page order of a PDF without merging or splitting.

Rotating Pages

1. Select a PDF from the queue. Its pages appear as thumbnails in the preview panel.
2. Click a thumbnail to select a single page. Hold Ctrl and click to select multiple pages. Click a thumbnail and hold Shift and click another to select a range.
3. In the Rotate tab, click Rotate 90° CW, Rotate 90° CCW, or Rotate 180°. The selected thumbnails update immediately to show the new orientation.
4. Click Save As to write the modified PDF to a new file, or Save to overwrite the original (a confirmation prompt appears before overwriting).

Reordering Pages

In the page preview panel, drag page thumbnails to new positions to reorder them. The blue insertion line shows where the dragged page will land. After arranging pages in the desired order, click Save As to write the reordered PDF. This is useful for fixing documents where pages were scanned out of order or where additional pages were inserted at the wrong position.

Deleting Pages

Select one or more page thumbnails and press the Delete Page button (or the Delete key) to remove those pages from the document. Deleted pages are shown with a strikethrough overlay until you save. You can undo deletions with Ctrl+Z before saving.

7. Compress PDFs

PDF compression reduces file size by optimizing embedded content — primarily by re-encoding embedded images at lower quality, removing unused objects, and compressing document streams.

Compression Presets

How to Compress

1. Add the PDF to the queue and select it.
2. Switch to the Compress tab.
3. Select a preset or use the custom quality slider.
4. Optionally enable Remove Metadata to strip document properties (author, creation date, etc.) for anonymization or further size reduction.
5. Click Compress. The output file is saved with a _compressed suffix unless you specify a custom name. The status bar shows original size, compressed size, and percentage reduction.

8. OCR — Scanned Document Text Extraction

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) converts scanned pages — which are essentially images inside a PDF — into machine-readable, searchable text. This is essential for working with documents received as scanned hard copies, photographed whiteboards, or PDF faxes.

Prerequisites

OCR requires Tesseract to be installed. Install Tesseract from github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/releases and ensure the installation path is in your system's PATH environment variable. PDFMaster detects Tesseract automatically on launch — the OCR tab will show a warning if Tesseract is not found.

OCR Modes

• Extract Text Only: Runs OCR on each page and exports the recognized text as a plain .txt file. Each page's text is separated by a page marker. Useful for indexing, searching, or copying text from scanned documents.
• Create Searchable PDF: Generates a new PDF with an invisible text layer overlaid on the original page images. The original appearance is preserved, but the document becomes searchable and copy-pasteable in any PDF viewer.

How to Run OCR

1. Add the scanned PDF to the queue and select it.
2. Switch to the OCR tab.
3. Select the document language from the Language dropdown. Choosing the correct language significantly improves accuracy. Multiple languages can be selected for bilingual documents.
4. Choose OCR mode (text extraction or searchable PDF).
5. Set the output path.
6. Click Run OCR. Processing time depends on page count and page resolution. Expect 2–10 seconds per page at 300 DPI. A progress bar tracks page-by-page completion.

9. Convert PDF to Images & Images to PDF

PDF to Images

Render each PDF page as a high-resolution image file. This is useful for embedding PDF content in presentations, editing individual pages in an image editor, or creating thumbnails for document management systems.

1. Add the PDF and select it in the queue.
2. Switch to the Convert tab and select PDF → Images.
3. Set the output image format (JPEG, PNG, or TIFF).
4. Set the resolution (DPI). 150 DPI is screen quality; 300 DPI is print quality; 600 DPI is archival quality. Higher DPI produces larger files.
5. Set the output folder. Click Convert. Output images are named source_page_001.jpg, source_page_002.jpg, etc.

Images to PDF

Combine a set of image files into a multi-page PDF. Common use cases: compiling a photo portfolio, digitizing physical documents, creating a PDF from screenshots.

1. Switch to the Convert tab and select Images → PDF.
2. Add image files using Add Images or Add Folder. Reorder images as needed using Move Up/Down or drag-and-drop.
3. Set the page size (Letter, A4, or Fit to Image — which sizes the PDF page to exactly match each image's dimensions).
4. Click Convert to PDF. Set the output filename and click Save.

10. Password Protection & Encryption

PDFMaster can add AES-256 encryption to any PDF, restricting access to authorized recipients only.

Adding Password Protection

1. Add the PDF to the queue and select it.
2. Switch to the Security tab.
3. Enter a User Password — this is the password required to open and read the document. Leave blank if you only want to restrict permissions without requiring a password to view.
4. Enter an Owner Password — this is the administrative password that allows modifying document permissions. The owner password must be different from the user password.
5. Configure Permissions:
   • Allow Printing: Enable or disable printing.
   • Allow Copying: Enable or disable text and image copying.
   • Allow Editing: Enable or disable annotation and form filling.
   • Allow Modifications: Enable or disable structural changes to the document.
6. Click Encrypt & Save As. The encrypted PDF is saved to the output path you specify.

Removing Password Protection

To decrypt a password-protected PDF: Add it to the queue. PDFMaster will prompt for the user or owner password. Enter the correct password. Switch to the Security tab and click Remove Password & Save As. The decrypted (open) PDF is saved to the output path.

11. Metadata Editing

PDF metadata is information embedded in the document structure that describes the document — visible in the Properties dialog of PDF viewers.

Viewable and Editable Fields

Editing Metadata

Select a PDF in the queue and switch to the Metadata tab. All current metadata values are loaded into editable fields. Make changes and click Save Metadata to write the changes to the PDF. The modification date is automatically set to the current timestamp.

12. Page Range Syntax

Page ranges are used in Split and selective Merge operations. The syntax follows a comma-separated format supporting individual pages and hyphenated ranges.

All page numbers are 1-based (page 1 is the first page). Page ranges must be within the document's total page count — out-of-range values produce a validation error before any processing begins.

13. Troubleshooting

Cannot open a password-protected PDF

PDFMaster prompts for the password when a protected file is added to the queue. Ensure you are entering the correct user password. If the PDF uses a legacy RC4 encryption (very old PDFs), PDFMaster may not be able to open it — try using a different tool to convert it to a modern AES-encrypted format first.

OCR produces inaccurate text

OCR accuracy depends heavily on the source image quality. Pages scanned at below 200 DPI, tilted/skewed scans, or handwritten text will produce poor results. Try to scan documents at 300 DPI or higher for best OCR accuracy. Ensure the correct language is selected — wrong language selection dramatically reduces accuracy.

Compression makes the file larger

This can happen if the source PDF already uses efficient compression and re-encoding adds overhead. This is particularly common with PDFs generated from vector graphics programs. In this case, use the Low Compression preset or skip compression entirely.

Merge output is missing pages from one file

Check that a page range was not accidentally set for that file in the queue. A blue indicator dot next to a filename in the queue means a page range restriction is active. Clear it by clicking the file and deleting the page range field.

Application crashes when processing very large PDFs

Very large PDFs (1000+ pages or hundreds of MBs) can exhaust available RAM during page thumbnail generation. Try processing the file with the preview panel minimized. Processing operations (merge, split, compress) use streaming and are more memory-efficient than the preview renderer.

PDFMaster User Manual — DennTech — v1.0 — May 2026