What is pdfmagus?

PDFMagus is a desktop application for managing PDF files, built with Python using Tkinter and CustomTkinter for its interface. It runs on Windows and lets you view and annotate PDFs with highlights, underlines, strikeouts, and squiggly marks, extract text from scanned pages using OCR, and convert, merge, split, rotate, or pull out specific pages from PDF files. The app is organized into tabs for editing, converting, and viewing logs, with the convert tab broken into separate panels for each operation such as merging, splitting, rotating, extracting pages, converting formats, and previewing results. Under the hood, the PDF logic, OCR handling, and reading history are each kept in their own parts of the code, along with reusable interface pieces like tooltips and a zoom slider. To use PDFMagus you need Python 3.10 or newer and a Windows machine, since parts of the window styling and the automatic detection of the OCR engine are written specifically for Windows. If you want to use the OCR button, you also need to install Tesseract OCR separately as a system program. Simply installing the Python package that talks to Tesseract is not enough on its own, the actual Tesseract software has to be present on the machine. Getting started involves cloning the project, creating a Python virtual environment, activating it, and installing the listed dependencies, after which you run the main program file to launch the app. For anyone who wants a standalone version rather than running it from source, the project can be packaged into a Windows executable using PyInstaller and a provided spec file, producing a ready to run .exe file. The README describes this as a fast, local way to handle everyday PDF tasks without needing an online service, and lists no cloud dependency anywhere in the workflow.