u/No_Split11911

over the last few years I’ve needed to author and edit PDFs and every single time I search for a solution and never find one that I want to come back to.

This year, in February, I needed some basic stuff that CutePDF+GhostScript could cover but I didn’t want to pay for a Windows XP era UI so I picked up a couple AI subscriptions and put together a simple app that did all of and only what cute pdf pro did.

6 months later and I have a near complete product replacement for Acrobat & Distiller. https://github.com/jasonulbright/spectra-pdf does it all. no ads, no telemetry, no website to login to, no weird license that will cause you future pains (MIT forever), just a high quality app that gives you the tools you need to create and edit PDFs. Oh, it also has support for 24+ languages, CLI support and some fancy batch OCR options.

For now this is a Windows only release but Linux and Mac are planned. I invite you to give it a try and let me know what you think about the speed and features of the app. Feature requests and bug reports are addressed as they come in, usually within 48 hours, so feel free to leave feedback here or on GitHub

What shipped: Open PDF Studio — a free, MIT-licensed PDF workbench for Windows. Twelve tools (organize, comment, fill & sign with real digital signatures, form prep, true redaction, OCR, compare, encrypt, optimize, repair, watermark, export), Acrobat's keyboard shortcuts verified against Adobe's published table, and every whole-file operation doubles as a CLI subcommand. No ads, no telemetry, no upsells. The goal was at-or-near 1:1 with Acrobat's everyday feature set, and if you daily-drive Acrobat, the muscle memory should just work.

Repo + installers: github.com/jasonulbright/Open-PDF-Studio

The fun part is how it got built.

I started by asking Fable 5 to write the prompt I should give it. Then I fed its own prompt back to it. It produced the full build plan and got to work — spawning Sonnet 5 subagents to review each phase, keeping a running list of deferrals, and re-ordering that list every few steps like a tiny project manager.

Then I hit my weekly limit almost immediately, because of course I did.

So the middle of this build belongs to Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5 — they did the majority of the heavy lifting while Fable 5 sat in timeout. When the reset landed today, Fable 5 came back, worked the deferral list down to zero, and v2.0.0 got tagged the same day.

Full disclosure: it didn't start from nothing. The base was SpectraPDF, an app I'd built earlier as a simple CutePDF alternative (minus the Windows XP-era UI). The jump from "splitter/merger with a nice theme" to "Acrobat-class workbench" is what the screenshots and the token bill are about.

The receipts: four days, a bit over two billion tokens across the Claude family. The cost column is API-equivalent pricing — I'm on a subscription, which is both why this was affordable and why the weekly limit found me. And yes, there's a $1.55 GPT-5.6 line item in there. Every production needs a cameo.

Feedback very welcome — especially bug reports.

I know it's low and five star but it's my first :)

Also I really love the retooling of this set.

Edit: pulled a noob move and sold it via new items filter. sigh...