Hi, I’m Anshul — building PaperLocal
Hi everyone — I’m Anshul, and I’m building PaperLocal, a private-by-default toolkit for everyday PDF work.
It’s for professionals, students, freelancers, and anyone who handles documents they don’t want uploaded to a third-party server. PaperLocal handles merging, splitting, page editing, conversion, watermarking, signing, and PDF-to-Markdown directly in the browser.
I started it because the upload step in most PDF tools always felt unnecessary—especially for contracts, reports, applications, and other sensitive files. I wanted the convenience of an online tool without handing the document to a server.
The next big focus is making PDF-to-Markdown genuinely useful for complex scans and handwritten PDFs through local OCR, while continuing to improve previews and mobile editing.
PaperLocal launches here tomorrow. I’d especially value thoughts on this: what’s the one PDF workflow you still reach for a desktop app to complete?
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Comments (4)
Welcome to the community, Anshul 🙋🏻♂️
Also, for some reason I thought that PaperLocal does upload documents to the server. No? Possibly words like "downloading" automatically make me think that I have to upload the file 🤷🏻♂️. Will it be accurate to say that the document will be processed locally, on my computer? 🤔
You can keep it friendly and clarify the core privacy point:
Thanks Sergey! And yes, exactly 😄
PaperLocal processes the document locally in your browser/device. The PDF itself isn’t uploaded to a server for processing.
That’s actually an interesting point about the wording around “upload/download” creating the impression that the file is being sent somewhere. I’ll take a look at making that clearer in the UI. Appreciate the feedback! 🙌
↳ Replying to Anshul Kapoor
You are very welcome, Anshul 👍🏻 So it works mostly with pages but if I want to edit text in someone's PDF, it will not let me. Right?
↳ Replying to Sergey Kargopolov
Yep, that’s right 👍🏻 At the moment, PaperLocal is mainly focused on page-level PDF operations like merging, splitting, reordering, rotating, extracting pages, etc.
Editing the actual text/content already inside a PDF isn’t supported yet. That’s a much more complex PDF-editing workflow, but definitely something I’m considering for the future. Thanks for calling it out! 🙌
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