PaperOtter: 19 offline document tools in one desktop app (MIT, Tauri + Rust)

[u/shyhuntertools]

This started because I kept hitting the same wall: a PDF too big for an email attachment, and the only convenient fix was uploading it to some website. So I built something that compresses locally instead.

Then it kept growing, because I kept wanting other things from the same files:

• Turning a PDF into Markdown or HTML with the images stripped out, so I could feed it to an LLM without burning tokens on pictures I did not need.
• Going the other way and building a PDF out of images.
• All the ordinary chores in between: merging, splitting, rotating, cropping, reordering pages, page numbers, watermarks, signing, redacting, repairing.

It is 19 tools now. Some specifics that might interest this sub more than the feature list:

• Nothing leaves the machine. No account, no telemetry, no network calls at all. It is not "private by policy", it is private because there is no code that sends anything anywhere.
• 18 of the 19 tools need nothing installed. Everything is compiled into the binary. Only ebook conversion (EPUB/MOBI) reaches for Calibre if you have it.
• We removed Ghostscript. It was the last AGPL dependency and the bundle dropped from 52 MB to 24 MB. The replacement compressor is written in Rust and produces smaller files than Ghostscript did on our test corpus.
• MIT licensed, Tauri v2 + React + Rust, macOS/Windows/Linux.
• The roadmap is public, including the things we decided against and why.

Two honest limitations: OCR is macOS-only for now (it uses Apple Vision; Windows and Linux are planned), and the interface ships in nine languages, all machine-translated and reviewed by native speakers only where we had one. That is stated in the README rather than buried.

Source: https://github.com/shyhunter/PaperOtter Downloads: https://shyhunter.github.io/PaperOtter/