1.0.0 — The first release

Creasepoint does thirty-seven things to a PDF, and it does all of them on your machine. There is no account to make, nothing to upload, no page limit, no watermark and no paid tier holding a feature back. It is free, and it stays free, because a copy of it costs us nothing to give you.

The thing worth understanding before anything else is how it treats your file. Open a document and edit it, and nothing is written anywhere until you press Save. The changes are held in memory, the file on disk is untouched, and the banner across the top tells you exactly how many changes are waiting and that the original has not moved. When you do save, you choose whether that replaces the document you opened or writes a copy, and the application says which it is about to do. A password-protected document is never written over at all: what you save from one is always a new file, and the file you opened keeps its password.

Text editing happens on the page rather than in a dialog. Double-click a paragraph and type into it; it re-wraps as you go and Enter puts it down. Signing uses a certificate from the Windows store or a DSC USB token, which is what most people filing anything official in India already have in a drawer. OCR ships with twelve languages, Indian ones included, and the language data is inside the installation - it does not fetch anything the first time you use it. Compression can target a size, which is the only thing you want when a portal refuses anything over 300 KB.

Two honest notes. The application is signed by Certum, so Windows can tell you who wrote it, but it is not on the Microsoft Store yet - that listing has not been submitted. And redaction removes the content rather than covering it: the objects under the mark come out of the file, and what is drawn afterwards is drawn over an empty space. Before it runs it lists what it is about to take - an image under the mark goes whole, a line of text the mark only clips goes whole, and a form field's value is not in the page at all and will survive. Read that list. It is the part of the feature that matters.

New: Thirty-seven tools in the window and forty-five on the command line, all of them included.

New: Redaction that removes the content, with the file searched for the removed text afterwards - the operation fails rather than reporting success if any of it is still findable.

New: Editing as a session: nothing reaches disk until you save, with undo, redo and discard across the whole session.

New: On-page text editing - double-click a paragraph and type where it sits.

New: Digital signing with a Windows certificate or a DSC token, PAdES, with an optional timestamp.

New: OCR in twelve bundled languages, including Indian ones, with the language data inside the installation.

New: Compression that targets a file size, with presets for common portal upload limits.

New: Forms filled on the page through the document's own form layer rather than by drawing over it.

New: A command line that mirrors the window, for scripting and batches.

New: Plain text out of a document, the document as one web page, and pictures in and out: PNG, JPEG, BMP and TIFF both ways, GIF in, and CCITT Group 4 scans read. A multi-page TIFF arrives as pages and leaves as one file.

Still not right: Redaction does not reach a form field's value, because that value is held in the document's form data rather than on the page. It says so, by field name, before it runs; clear the field or flatten the form first.

Still not right: The Microsoft Store listing has not been submitted; today the only way to install is the signed package.

Still not right: There is no way to cancel a long operation once it starts; it will stop itself if it takes too long.

Still not right: Editing text in a font the document only partly embeds re-sets that line in the closest system font, and the application tells you when it has.

Still not right: CCITT Group 3 TIFFs - what a fax produces - are refused by name rather than read. Group 4, which is what a document scanner set to black and white produces, reads. Saving a Group 3 file again as anything else is the way through.