Novus PDFStudio
Open PDF Editor

Changelog

What’s new in Novus PDF Studio

Every meaningful update — new browser-local tools, improvements to the PDF Editor, and fixes. Everything we ship keeps your files on your device.

21 releasesLatest: Aug 8, 2026
  1. Latest

    A Learn centre, articles that link onward, and four accessibility fixes

    • NewA Learn centre at /learn. The teaching material was spread across five pages with five different shapes, and finding something meant already knowing which page held it. It is now one list you filter by the job you are doing — filling a form, signing, organizing pages, highlighting and erasing, protecting and unlocking, working offline — by how familiar you already are, and by whether you want a guide, a short tutorial, a shortcut, an answer or a workflow step. It adds no new writing: every entry is the same prose the original page renders, so the two cannot disagree.
    • NewFilters live in the address bar. /learn?task=sign is a link you can send someone, and the page opens already filtered. A stale or mistyped filter falls back to the full list rather than an empty page.
    • NewTwo new articles: “Electronic vs Digital Signature: Which One a PDF Actually Needs”, on how to tell which kind of signature a document is asking for and what a browser can and cannot produce; and “Building a PDF From a Blank Page: What the Creation Zone Does and Does Not Do”, including how measured cells keep a real invoice table aligned when descriptions wrap.
    • NewFour privacy-safe sample PDFs now open directly in the editor: an application form for field detection, an agreement letter for signing, a project report for page tools, and a locked notice for the password workflow. They are generated fixtures, contain no personal information, and can be regenerated byte-for-byte from the repository source.
    • NewA “Keep reading” block at the end of every article, so a post finally links on to the related posts it already named internally.
    • FixedArticles were telling search engines they had been revised on the day they were published — the structured data set a last-modified date equal to the publication date for posts that had never been touched since. An article now carries a revision date only when its prose actually changed, and shows one only then.
    • FixedAn automated accessibility scan now runs as part of the test suite, checking against WCAG 2.2 AA. It walks every registered page except the tool pages and the articles, which share one template each and are sampled — one tool page and the newest article — rather than scanned over and over to prove the same template clean. Its first run found four real barriers and all four are fixed: the slide-out menu stayed in the keyboard tab order while it was closed, so tabbing any page landed on an invisible, unannounced theme button; the cookie banner's Accept button did not meet the contrast minimum; the homepage's “Drop a PDF to begin” label faded below the contrast minimum as it pulsed; and the page preview in the creation zone could not be scrolled with a keyboard, which meant a keyboard-only user could not see past its first page.
    • FixedThree pages described the product inaccurately and have been corrected. The security page claimed a content security policy and cross-origin isolation that are not in force — the policy currently runs in report-only mode, which observes rather than blocks, and is no longer presented as protection. The accessibility page claimed automated auditing on every release, which did not exist when it was written; it now describes the scan that does exist and does not call it an audit. The features page said images could not be put into a PDF, which stopped being true when the creation zone gained image blocks; what is genuinely missing is a bulk converter, and that is what it now says.
    • ImprovedThe plain-text copy of the site that AI assistants read (/llms-full.txt) now carries the full guides, mini tutorials, shortcuts, FAQ answers and workflow steps, plus the release history and a one-line summary of every remaining page. It previously covered only the tool pages, the articles, signing and the creation zone, so an assistant answering a question about this site was working from about half of it.
    • ImprovedThe footer now lists every section of the site, grouped the same way the slide-out menu is, rather than the twelve links it was written with — /create, /sign-pdf, /features, /tool-map, /about, /accessibility, /security, /status, /press, /search and /learn were all missing from it. Individual tool pages and articles are still reached through their hubs rather than listed one by one. The menu itself gained the Learn centre.

  2. The complete local PDF workflow

    • NewFive focused tools: lossless or clearly labelled raster compression, form flattening, PDF pages to PNG or JPEG, images to a multi-page PDF, and English, French or Spanish OCR with a searchable text layer. OCR assets are self-hosted and low-confidence words remain reviewable rather than becoming automatic form fields.
    • NewThe homepage now inspects a selected PDF locally — page count, size, encryption, forms, annotations and scan likelihood — and recommends an appropriate next action without transmitting the file.
    • NewFour visible multi-step workflows run through one six-state queue with pause-for-action steps, retry, cancel, checkpoints and undo. Split is terminal, Protect normally runs last, and status comes from the real operation rather than a decorative progress list.
    • NewSave on this device is an explicit IndexedDB action with quota preflight, atomic writes, retained-size evidence, per-session deletion and Delete All. It never stores passwords or silently autosaves document bytes; the live editor stays unchanged if a save fails.
    • ImprovedExports now report evidence from the finished PDF: pages, selectable text, forms and annotations, signature representation, encryption verification, rasterized pages and warnings. New signatures are normalized vector strokes; legacy bitmap signatures remain readable.
    • ImprovedThe creation zone now supports real lists, reusable headers and footers, authored page add/delete/reorder controls, circles, arrows, expanded application and consent templates, content undo/redo, and explicit regular/bold/italic TTF or OTF variants embedded with shared preview/export metrics.
    • ImprovedEvery article now carries truthful organizational authorship, topic and difficulty metadata, primary-source records where citations exist, related-article relationships, real modified dates and product-domain canonical ownership. The editorial policy explains review, corrections, AI assistance, primary sources and freshness.
    • FixedPDF.js annotation appearance streams no longer create phantom form suggestions: geometry between beginAnnotation and endAnnotation is ignored, while the real AcroForm widget remains detectable exactly once.

  3. Create a PDF from a blank page

    • NewEvery other part of this site starts with a PDF you already have. /create starts with a blank page: choose the paper (A4, Letter, Legal, A3, A5, Tabloid, or your own dimensions), the orientation, and each of the four margins separately.
    • NewHeadings, paragraphs, spacing and page breaks, each with its own font, size, color and alignment, plus bold and italic. Text is embedded as text, so it stays selectable, searchable and copyable in the finished file — a screen reader can read it and Ctrl+F finds it. The three standard PDF families are available (Helvetica, Times and Courier); uploading your own font is not supported.
    • NewImages and horizontal rules. A rule is a real drawn line with its own thickness, width and color, not a row of underscores. PNG and JPEG go in as they are, and WebP, AVIF, GIF and SVG are converted in the browser when you pick them, because a PDF cannot carry those formats. An image sits on its own line: text does not wrap around it, two images do not sit side by side, and one taller than the page is shrunk to fit rather than split in half across two.
    • NewTables with real cells and drawn borders. A cell wraps inside its own column instead of running into the next one, the row grows to its tallest cell, columns are sized from what is in them unless you weight them yourself, and a header row can be repeated at the top of every page the table continues onto. Borders can be drawn on every edge, on the horizontal rules only, or not at all. This is what a monospaced paragraph could never be: a paragraph collapses every run of whitespace to a single space before it is measured, so padding columns with spaces does not line them up no matter which font you choose.
    • NewFree-form shapes — a rectangle or a line, placed by x and y offsets in points rather than by the flow. A negative vertical offset pulls the shape back up over the blocks above it, and graphics are painted before text on every page, so a filled shape lands behind the words rather than over them. That is how you draw a box around a paragraph. There are no circles, arrows or curves.
    • NewPage numbers along the top or bottom edge, left, center or right, written as a bare number, “Page 1”, or “1 of 4”, with the option to leave the first page unnumbered.
    • NewStarting templates — blank document, formal letter, meeting notes, invoice and intake form — with square brackets marking the parts meant to be replaced. The invoice template lays its line items out in a monospaced Courier paragraph rather than in the table block, which predates that block and is worth replacing if you start from it.
    • ImprovedThe live preview is not a second renderer. It runs the same layout the exporter runs, measured against the same embedded fonts, so the position you see on screen is the position in the exported file.
    • ImprovedThe document exists in this tab only. Nothing is uploaded, which also means nothing is backed up — closing the tab loses the draft, so download the PDF when you are happy with it.

  4. A page about signing, and a signature that says what it is

    • New/sign-pdf walks through drawing a signature, placing it on the signing line, filling in the rest of the form, and exporting — with answers to the questions people ask before they trust a browser with a signed document.
    • NewThe page opens by separating two things that share a name. An electronic signature is your handwriting on the page, which is what this does. A digital signature is certificate-backed: it identifies the signer and makes any later edit detectable. That needs a private key and a certificate authority, neither of which exists inside a browser tab, so this cannot produce one. If a form specifically asks for the second kind, use software your organization issued you.
    • FixedTwo places on the site described a drawn signature as a vector path that stays sharp at any size. It never was one — the signature is drawn on a canvas and embedded as a trimmed PNG. The copy now says what it actually is: a high-resolution image with a genuinely transparent background, which is the part that beats a photo of a signed sheet.
    • ImprovedThe signature capture went from 400×200 to 1200×600, with the stroke width and trim padding scaled to match. A signature stretched along a long signing line no longer goes visibly soft. It is trimmed to the ink either way, so the file grows by a few kilobytes.

  5. Site search, feeds, a mega menu, and seven new pages

    • NewA search page at /search covering the tools, guides, tutorials, FAQs, how-it-works and every article — searching their prose, not just their titles, though each article is indexed to its opening ~1,500 characters rather than in full. The index is built when the site is deployed and the query runs on your device, so what you type is never sent anywhere. The ?q= in the address bar is part of the link, so a search can be shared.
    • NewRSS. /feed.xml carries every article and is advertised in the page head, so a reader can subscribe from any page without hunting for the address. Each blog category also has its own feed at /feeds/<category>/feed.xml — those are not yet linked from the head or the UI, so for now you need the address.
    • NewA menu in the desktop header that opens onto the whole site at once: the PDF tools on one side, the learning material on the other, grouped by the job you are trying to get done. Enter opens it, arrow keys move through it, and Escape closes it and puts focus back on the button.
    • NewSeven pages the site did not have — About, Features, Tool map, Accessibility, Security, Press kit and Status. Several of them lead with limits rather than capabilities: what the erase tool does not do, why a PDF's permission flags are advisory rather than enforced, and why a scanned image carries no text to search or edit.
    • NewA skip link at the top of every page, so a keyboard or screen-reader user can jump past the navigation to the content.
    • FixedTwo releases landed on the same day in July and the changelog gave both entries the same id, so any link to that date jumped to whichever came first. Each entry now has its own.

  6. Text exports where you put it, and undo goes deeper

    • FixedText and number fields exported slightly below where you placed them on the canvas. The canvas positions a line by the top of its letters; the PDF positions it by the baseline they sit on, and the export subtracted the whole font size as though those were the same distance apart. They are not — at 14 pt Helvetica it is 3.95 pt out. Both now measure from one shared offset, so they cannot disagree again. Marks and signatures were never affected, exactly as reported: neither involves a font baseline.
    • FixedThe Page Numbers tool repeated the same arithmetic. With no draggable canvas to compare against, the shift was never visually obvious there, but a number set against the top edge sat lower than its margin claimed and one against the bottom let descenders drop into the margin.
    • ImprovedUndo in the editor's document tools now holds up to ten steps instead of one, and once there is more than one to take back the control shows how many are left. Merge, then rotate, then change your mind about both.
    • FixedUndo could reach across a document change and bring the wrong file back: transform one document, start fresh, open another, undo — and the first document returned, elements and all, over the one you were working on. Both reset paths now clear the history.
    • FixedEvery transform after the first held on to the document it replaced for the life of the tab. Those are released now, as they are when a step falls off the end of the history.

  7. Erase that can really remove, and four reported editor defects

    • FixedWhite-out only ever drew an opaque box. The words underneath stayed in the file, still selectable, searchable and copyable, and a box could not even hide a form checkbox in the export. There is now a Remove mode that rebuilds each page holding an erase area as an image, so the content under the box is deleted from the file. Cover stays the default because it is the reversible one, and it is labelled for what it is: not redaction, and not a way to hide sensitive information.
    • FixedThe eraser stopped responding the moment you pressed on an existing element — the canvas checked what was under the cursor first and switched you back to the select tool before the erase could run. Mask tools now take precedence, and an eraser left armed is disarmed when you leave manual mode, so a click meant to fill a field cannot erase the text beneath it.
    • NewThe Organize tool's sidebar had a sentence where its controls should have been, so reordering a long document had to be done on the canvas. It now has a page list with jump-to, move-to, range selection, reverse, sort, and bulk rotate, duplicate and delete.
    • ImprovedPage thumbnails each parsed the whole document again — dozens of copies open at once on a long file. They now share one parsed document and render through a queue, and long grids only draw the tiles in view.
    • FixedHelp tooltips in the editor were cut off by the panels around them at every desktop width; they are drawn above the page now. The scroll wheel over the document frame also did nothing at most zoom levels, and scrolls the page again.
    • ImprovedIn a text box tall enough to show more than one line, Enter now starts a new line instead of jumping to the next field, and the box grows as lines are added so the editor shows what the export will contain. Short boxes keep the old behavior, with Shift+Enter for a line break.

  8. Installable app with offline editor and tools

    • NewAdded a web app manifest, home-screen icons, and a soft install prompt so you can run Novus PDF like an app on desktop and mobile.
    • NewA service worker caches the app shell and PDF runtime after your first visit, so the editor and tools can open offline. Your documents still stay on this device and are never written into that cache.
    • ImprovedAdvertising and analytics requests stay network-only — the service worker never serves cached Google AdSense or Analytics responses.

  9. Switched advertising to Google AdSense

    • ImprovedAdvertising now uses Google AdSense Auto Ads only. Adsterra banners, side rails, native strip, Social Bar, Direct Link promo, and the export sponsor tab are gone, along with Infolinks in-text ads.
    • ImprovedExporting or printing no longer opens a sponsor tab. Your download stays in the same tab with nothing else competing for focus.
    • ImprovedThe same advertising cookie preference still gates ads: opt-in in the EEA, UK and Switzerland, opt-out elsewhere, with Global Privacy Control honored as an opt-out.

  10. Ads now load reliably, and a new floating unit

    • FixedMost banner ads were never actually loading. Every unit on a page shared one piece of browser state that each ad script reads the moment it starts, so on any connection slower than instant they all read the last unit's settings, disagreed with themselves, and quietly rendered nothing. Each banner now loads in its own isolated frame, so they no longer overwrite one another. In testing this took a page from two of five banners filling to all six.
    • FixedPhones were hit hardest by the same problem, because the few ad slots sized for a small screen were the ones most likely to lose the race. Mobile ads should now appear consistently.
    • FixedThe sitewide native strip stayed blank after moving between pages — the loader only ran on the first page you landed on. It now refreshes with each page.
    • NewAdded Adsterra's Social Bar, a small floating unit that appears while you browse. It follows the same advertising preference as everything else: off until you opt in across the EEA, UK and Switzerland, and switched off everywhere else the moment you decline or turn advertising off on the cookies page.

  11. Advertising choices now follow your region

    • NewThe contact page now shows where we are — London, Ontario, Canada — with a map and a link to open it in Google Maps. We are a remote, email-only team, so there is no office to visit, but you can see who you are writing to.
    • ImprovedAdvertising now follows where you are. In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland nothing loads until you opt in, exactly as before. Everywhere else ads start on and a single toggle on the cookies page turns them off. Analytics stays opt-in everywhere.
    • NewIf your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, advertising is treated as declined and no ad tag loads.
    • ImprovedA choice you have already made is never overridden. If you declined, you stay declined — the region default only decides for visitors who have not chosen. After six months the banner asks once more, and until you answer, your previous answer keeps applying.
    • ImprovedThe sponsor tab on export and print still requires you to turn Advertising on explicitly, in every country. It never opens by default.
    • FixedThe sponsored strip at the top of each page no longer leaves an empty bordered box behind when you are not seeing ads.
    • FixedThe Advertising toggle on the cookies page now reflects what is actually happening rather than always starting at Off, and the page no longer refers to a Google consent message that this site does not use.

  12. A sponsor tab that keeps exports free

    • NewExporting or printing a document opens a sponsor page in a new browser tab. Your PDF keeps generating and downloading in the original tab, so you can close the sponsor tab and pick up exactly where you left off.
    • ImprovedThe sponsor tab appears at most once every 15 minutes and only if you have turned on the Advertising cookie preference — export five drafts in a row and you will still only see it once.

  13. Bigger blog, one-tap sharing, and a cleaner editor

    • NewTen new in-depth guides — filling forms, signing, highlighting and white-out, redaction, rotating, page numbers, unlocking, PDF vs Word, filling a government form, and a complete editor walkthrough — each with its own illustration.
    • NewA Share button on articles, guides, tutorials, and the changelog that posts to X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, WhatsApp, Pinterest, or email — or opens your device's native share sheet.
    • ImprovedThe blog now shows a preview image on every card, plus quick search and tag chips so you can find an article faster.
    • ImprovedRicher link previews when pages are shared, more structured data for search engines, and deeper written content across the tools hub, tutorials, and how-it-works pages.
    • FixedForm fields and typed text no longer show a faint grey outline while you edit — it was only ever on-screen and never part of the exported PDF, and now it's gone from the canvas too.
    • FixedThe AI scan is better at telling signature lines apart from ordinary text fields, so signatures are detected as signatures — including lines labelled underneath, and fields that merely sit inside a section named “signature”.
    • FixedFewer stray boxes on official fillable forms — the scan now trusts a form's built-in fields and no longer guesses extra boxes on column headers or instruction lines.
    • FixedMobile polish: the bottom navigation, cookie banner, and footer no longer overlap on phones and tablets.

  14. Infolinks ads and cleaner form scans

    • NewIntroduced Infolinks in-text ads and Adsterra side rails, both gated behind your advertising cookie choice and clearly separated from your document.
    • ImprovedThe AI form scan now skips leftover table-header and amount cells, so scanned forms come back with fewer stray boxes to clean up.

  15. Consent-aware ads and privacy hardening

    • FixedThe Advertising cookie preference is now fully honored — Google ads load only after you turn it on, and toggling it takes effect immediately, even across open tabs.
    • ImprovedHardened the site with a full set of security response headers — clickjacking, MIME-sniffing, referrer, and browser-feature protections — plus a content security policy.

  16. Blog, light theme, and tool reliability

    • NewLaunched the Novus PDF Studio blog with five in-depth guides — PDF basics, merging, splitting and organizing, security, and productivity — plus category filtering and per-article illustrations.
    • NewA light theme with a one-tap header toggle. Novus now opens in light mode by default, with dark mode a click away and your choice remembered across visits.
    • ImprovedThe standalone PDF tools now share the editor's rendering and export pipeline, so output matches wherever you work.
    • ImprovedOverhauled page content, metadata, and structured data across the site for clearer search results and richer link-preview cards.
    • FixedAssorted editor and PDF tool bugs surfaced during the overhaul.

  17. Browser-local PDF tools hub

    • NewA hub of seven focused PDF tools — merge, split, organize, rotate, page numbers, protect, and unlock — each with its own workspace.
    • NewEvery tool runs entirely on your device. Files are processed locally and never uploaded to a server.

  18. Navigation and brand refresh

    • NewA slide-out navigation drawer and a refreshed brand mark.
    • ImprovedRicher link-preview cards and general polish across pages.
    • FixedThe mobile hero demo no longer overflows or gets cut off on small screens.

  19. Site redesign and smarter form scanning

    • ImprovedRedesigned the site pages and shell, and expanded the tooling throughout.
    • ImprovedMore accurate AI field detection when scanning forms, with fewer misplaced fields.
    • FixedScan and markup tool issues in the editor.

  20. Scanner accuracy, exports, and mobile

    • ImprovedBig gains in AI form-field scanning — near-eliminated spurious fields and improved date and checkbox detection.
    • ImprovedExport and print parity between the on-screen canvas and the downloaded PDF.
    • NewCookie preferences and refined social sharing metadata.
    • FixedMobile editor loading, zoom, overflow, and the export menu.

  21. Initial launch

    • NewFirst release of Novus PDF Studio — a browser-local PDF editor with AI-assisted form-field scanning, fill, and signing.

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