Every PDF task,
on one quiet
workbench.
Merge, convert, compress, sign, redact, OCR and interrogate your documents. A complete set of tools with the calm of a well-organised print shop — and none of the noise.
- Tools
- 41
- Sign-ups
- Zero
- File expiry
- 2 hrs
- Watermarks
- None
Drop a file.
We will find the right tool.
The everyday bench.
The eight jobs that land on this desk most often. Each one is a single pass — no wizard, no upsell.
All toolsThe page is the interface.
Open a PDF and work directly on it. Drag pages into order, type on the sheet, draw a redaction box, place a signature, or crop to a drawn region. The export is baked, not a fragile layer of annotations.
- 01Edit & annotate
Text, highlights, shapes, freehand ink, images.
- 02Organise visually
Reorder, rotate, duplicate and delete pages on a contact sheet.
- 03Redact for real
Draw boxes or find terms; affected pages are rasterised.
- 04Sign with an audit trail
Draw, type or upload a signature. Get a SHA-256 record.
Seven families. Forty-one tools.
Everything is grouped the way the work actually arrives: arrange, refine, transform, mark up, secure, fill, understand.
Three moves. Then it is done.
No accounts, no onboarding, no “upgrade to export”. Just a clean hand-off between you and the engine.
-
01
Drop the file
Choose a tool or let PaperLab suggest one from the file type. Everything stays local until you press start.
-
02
Set the job
Use plain controls for pages, quality and position. Or open the studio when the job needs eyes and hands.
-
03
Take the result
Watch the progress, then download the finished files. They expire automatically so nothing lingers.
Your files are guests, not inventory.
Uploads live in a temporary work directory and are removed after the job window closes. No accounts, no document library, no training corpus. When you deploy PaperLab yourself, the files never leave your server.
Every job has a TTL. The default is two hours; the server sweeps expired work automatically.
Processing engines run on the same host. AI and translation are optional and off unless configured.
No added watermarks, no locked exports, no quiet re-encoding of your originals.
Honest about what is running.
PaperLab is a Go service with a static front end. It uses pdfcpu for document structure, Poppler for text and rendering, Ghostscript for compression and PDF/A, qpdf for repair and encryption, Tesseract for OCR, and headless Chrome for the web. Tools that need a missing engine are marked instead of quietly failing.
Inspect the health endpointA workshop you can take home.
The whole product ships as a Go binary plus static assets. Run it on a laptop, a VPS, or in a container. The API is small and documented by example: upload a job, poll it, download the outputs.
# upload a PDF and start a job
curl -X POST https://your-host/api/jobs \
-F tool=compress \
-F options='{"level":"balanced"}' \
-F files=@report.pdf
# → { "id": "…", "status": "queued" }
curl https://your-host/api/jobs/…
# → outputs[].url, ready to download
Keep the workshop open.
PaperLab is free, open source, and independent. Sponsors cover the engines, the hosting, and the time it takes to keep 41 tools sharp.
One-time or monthly on GitHub Sponsors