Local-first · Free & open source

Every PDF tool you need, on your own machine.

Fill, OCR, redact, compare, sign, convert, and reshape PDFs — without a subscription, an account, or the cloud.

Nib opens like a desktop app but runs as a tiny local server in your browser. One self-contained binary. Nothing you open, type, or sign ever leaves your computer.

Download Compare to Acrobat & Foxit

100% offline · GPLv3 · Linux, macOS & Windows · no account, ever

One tool for everything you do to a PDF

From a quick form fill to a cryptographic signature — the whole workflow, in one place, on your machine.

Fill any form — even flat scans

Type into real AcroForm fields, or onto a flat or scanned page. Detect finds the blanks; Save as fillable form turns a scan into a real fillable PDF.

On-device OCR, 41 languages

Make scans searchable with an invisible text layer — Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic & Hebrew (RTL), and Chinese, Japanese & Korean. Runs in your browser; no cloud, no upload.

Real redaction

Black boxes that actually remove what's underneath — not a rectangle over live text. Search-and-redact every SSN, email, phone, or card number in one pass.

Visual & text compare

See what changed between two versions: a word-level text diff and a per-pixel difference map that works on scans, with automatic page alignment.

Sign & timestamp

Certify with your own certificate, fix the time with an RFC-3161 timestamp, or anchor proof-of-when to the Bitcoin blockchain with OpenTimestamps.

Peer-to-peer co-signing

Two people sign one document over an encrypted, no-cloud channel — like DocuSign, without the server in the middle.

Convert Office & PDF/A

Open Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OpenDocument files as PDFs, and export an archival PDF/A-2b for documents that must outlive their apps.

Tables → spreadsheets

Pull a page's table straight out to XLSX, ODS, or CSV — the spreadsheet is built on your machine, no office suite required.

Reshape pages

Merge, split, rotate, crop, N-up, normalize sizes, stamp Bates numbers, set logical page labels, edit the bookmark outline — all reversible with undo.

Encrypt & sanitize

AES-256 password protection, plus a hidden-content scan that strips JavaScript, auto-run actions, metadata, and embedded files from a document.

Scriptable command line

Over twenty headless nib commands — sign, redact, stamp, split, convert — batch a whole folder, or pipe PDFs through stdin and stdout.

Yours to keep

Free and open source under the GPL. Your documents and signing identity live in an encrypted vault sealed to your SSH key — it unlocks with no password.

See it in action

A real desktop-style window, running in your browser — here filling a form, spotting what changed between two revisions, and making a scan searchable. Click any shot to enlarge.

Nib filling a membership application — every field is a real, editable form field. — Fill real form fields — or a flat scan

Nib's visual compare highlighting in red the two fields that changed between two versions of a form. — See exactly what changed, down to the pixel

Nib running OCR on a Hindi scan, with a language picker that covers 41 languages. — OCR a scan in any of 41 languages

Why Nib

🔒

100% local

Nothing leaves your machine. No account, no cloud, no telemetry — the site you're reading loads zero third-party fonts or trackers, and the app does the same.

🆓

Free & open

GPLv3, top to bottom. Read it, rebuild it, trust it. No subscription, no per-seat license, no upsell — the whole tool, for everyone, for free.

📦

One binary

A single self-contained download — the UI, the PDF engine, and the OCR are all embedded. No installer, no runtime, no dependencies to chase.

⌨️

App or CLI

Click through a desktop-style window, or script every operation from the command line and batch an entire folder. Same engine, your choice.

How Nib compares

Against the three best-known PDF editors. Legend: ✅ built in · 🟡 partial or limited · ❌ not available.

Capability	Nib	Adobe Acrobat Pro	Foxit PDF Editor	PDF-XChange Editor
Fill forms — including flat & scanned	✅	✅	✅	✅
Turn a scan into a fillable form	✅	✅	✅	✅
On-device OCR (41 languages)	✅	✅	✅	✅
True redaction + PII search-and-redact	✅	✅	✅	✅
Visual and text document compare	✅	✅	✅	🟡
Edit existing text with paragraph reflow	🟡	✅	✅	✅
Digital signature with your own certificate	✅	✅	✅	✅
RFC-3161 trusted timestamp	✅	✅	✅	✅
OpenTimestamps (Bitcoin) proof of when	✅	❌	❌	❌
Peer-to-peer co-signing, no server	✅	❌	❌	❌
PDF/A archival export	✅	✅	✅	✅
Office ↔ PDF conversion	✅	✅	✅	🟡
Table → spreadsheet (XLSX / ODS / CSV)	✅	✅	✅	🟡
Merge, split, rotate, crop, N-up, Bates, labels	✅	✅	✅	✅
AES-256 encryption	✅	✅	✅	✅
Scriptable command line / batch a folder	✅	❌	❌	🟡
Runs 100% offline, no account, no telemetry	✅	❌	🟡	✅
Free & open source (GPLv3)	✅	❌	❌	❌
Single self-contained binary, cross-platform	✅	❌	❌	❌
Price	🟢 Free	🔴 Subscription	🔴 Paid	🟡 Free tier

Acrobat, Foxit and PDF-XChange are mature commercial editors that do plenty Nib doesn't aim to — full WYSIWYG layout editing, prepress, cloud collaboration. This is about the jobs Nib does cover, and where it works differently. Reach for a commercial editor when you need full content editing; reach for Nib when you want to own your tools.

How it works

Nib is one small Go program. It serves its whole interface — and a PDF engine, and the OCR — to your browser over 127.0.0.1, and never opens a port to the network. Your documents, signatures, and signing identity live in an AES-256 vault sealed to your SSH key. Build it and run it:

# build the single binary
go build -o nib ./cmd/nib

# open a document in the desktop-style app
./nib invoice.pdf

Or skip the window and script it — over twenty headless commands, composable through stdin/stdout:

# certify a contract with your own certificate
nib sign contract.pdf -o signed.pdf --cert me.p12

# anchor proof-of-when to the Bitcoin blockchain
nib timestamp report.pdf

# scrub a whole folder of hidden content, in place
nib sanitize -w *.pdf

# OCR, then redact every SSN — composed in one pipeline
nib optimize in.pdf -o - | nib sanitize - -o clean.pdf

Download

One self-contained binary — fully offline, with no runtime dependencies. Grab the build for your system, or find every platform, architecture, and past version on GitHub.

Linux

Debian & Ubuntu get a .deb that adds Nib to your Office menu. Any other distro: the static nib-…-linux-<arch> binary runs anywhere.

Download .deb (Debian / Ubuntu)

Static binary (any distro)

macOS

One self-contained binary for Intel (amd64) and Apple Silicon (arm64). No installer — download nib-…-darwin-<arch> and run it directly.

Download for macOS

Windows

A standalone nib-…-windows-<arch>.exe for amd64 and arm64. Nothing to install — run the executable and Nib opens in your browser.

Download for Windows

All platforms

On a different system, or want a specific architecture, checksum, or past version? Every build and the full source live on the project's GitHub page.

View on GitHub

On Debian or Ubuntu, install the downloaded package so Nib appears under your Office menu:

sudo dpkg -i nib_*.deb

Prefer to build from source? It's one Go command — Linux, macOS, or Windows:

git clone https://github.com/daniel-alexander4/nib && cd nib
go build -o nib ./cmd/nib
./nib

The first run sets up a vault sealed to your SSH key, then opens Nib in your browser. That's it — no account to create, nothing to configure, nothing phoning home.

Own your PDF workflow.

Free, open, and entirely yours — on your machine, for as long as you keep it.

Download See the features