KillerPDF

1.9.1 strengthens redaction and protected-file handling, preserves edits through saves and exports, and improves paragraph editing, search, scan quality, damaged-PDF recovery, and Windows previews.

Fixed

• Redaction removes covered content from repeated images and text, including identical image samples stored with different encodings, content outside a crop box, and content behind a divided spread. Rasterized pages lose their old search layer, and verification checks for surviving text.
• Redaction clears hidden copies, private editor data, parent-field values, structure descriptions, Header & Footer descriptions, and comments referenced by replies. Deep structure trees are cleaned completely or refused.
• Find and Redact includes current text edits and form values, removes matched overlays, and refuses stale search marks. Ligatures, invisible characters, and words split across lines remain searchable without losing literal hyphens.
• Redaction finds annotation appearance text, including button captions, signature names, and stamps. Unreadable page, field, or annotation content is identified instead of reported as no match; macro and command line redaction save nothing and exit with 3 when a search is incomplete.
• Damaged protected PDFs are refused before a rewrite can break encryption, signatures, certification, or Reader usage rights. Missing or escaped security entries and intervening comments cannot bypass those checks, and files that cannot be unlocked are not imported as garbled pages.
• Saving, reducing, or protecting signed PDFs asks before removing signatures or usage rights, including signatures with missing or damaged optional details. Certified PDFs that permit form filling retain valid signatures and field locks through Save and Save As.
• Failed form conversion, flattening, and text replacement preserve pending values, formatting, document state, and history. Deleting a field retires its pending values so a recreated field cannot inherit them; Undo restores the deleted values.
• Image and separation exports ask before replacing their actual output files and preserve existing output on write failure. Distinct ink names no longer collide, and data merge refuses to overwrite its input template.
• Malformed nested stream lengths, color spaces, or long bookmark chains no longer crash the app and lose other tabs' unsaved work. Save failures when moving fields, placing presets, scaling or reordering pages, and editing bookmarks report an error.
• Explorer previews initialize correctly in the Windows preview host and keep their interface responsive through resize and reuse. Incomplete and failed pages show an accessible warning and Retry while readable neighbors remain available.
• Redaction preserves unrelated images, transparency, colors, Type 3 text, patterns, masks, and stamps that share resources. Shared image lists and tagged forms no longer cause false failures, crop-offset marks stay aligned, and harmless distant drawing content prompts for rasterization less often.
• Image export and OCR-generated PDFs include current form values, formatting, visible markup, and page orientation without changing the open document. Font-size-only form edits survive saving and printing.
• The Text tool works in Single, Two-Page, and Grid views after page turns and tab changes. Editing a line keeps its own size and position, places replacement text above intervening content, and refuses later content or clips that would hide it without removing a neighboring numeral or watermark.
• Find counts each occurrence within a word, and Replace Current changes only the selected occurrence. Find and Replace preserves unmatched ligature letters, honors field length limits and read-only fields, and recalculates dependent form values.
• Search runs in the background, cancels superseded queries, and keeps each tab's results and options separate. Damaged-document searches retain readable matches and name unreadable pag

1.9.0 "Overkill" replaces PDFium with KillerPDF's own engine and expands document editing, conversion, security and automation.

Security

• Redaction removes covered vectors and sensitive descriptions from affected content, and refuses output when form values, descriptions or undecodable content cannot be safely removed. Marks survive page edits and Undo; macro approvals remain tied to the source document, and unattended runs stop when rasterization needs approval (#341, #343).
• Signature verification separates expiry from failed trust, checks trusted timestamps for historical validity, and reports authority identity and offline revocation evidence. Embedded certificates never become trust anchors.
• Legacy Office conversion disables VBA macros. Translation test files load as text, unsafe HTML-export links stay inert, and scripts can supply PDF passwords through standard input.
• Table exports and batch CSV reports prevent document values and filenames from becoming spreadsheet formulas.
• Command-line edits honor the permissions of a PDF opened with its user password, as Acrobat does; the owner password lifts them.
• Forwarded file opens are restricted to the same Windows account and session. Installation rejects folders containing unrelated or unverified files, and portable updates no longer run a helper script from the temp folder.
• Updates install only a release whose checksum line names exactly the downloaded file, whose version is the offered release and newer than the running copy, and whose valid signature names the installed copy's publisher, so updates keep working after the publisher's certificate is renewed. The installer is checked again just before it starts, and portable updates roll back when the new launcher cannot be confirmed.

Fixed

• Update and uninstall helpers load PowerShell modules only from Windows' own folder, so a module planted in your Documents cannot run inside them as administrator; a failed uninstall reports the real reason and retries when a copy is still running; a stalled update says so instead of silently doing nothing; and the window no longer freezes while an update is handed off.

• An update that cannot finish because the app did not close says so in its recovery report, the Update button stays off once an update has started, and a translation file can no longer give a setting the wrong kind of value.

• The elevated part of an update compiles its helper code in a folder only administrators can open, so another program running as you cannot slip code into it, and an update that finished is no longer reported as failed when the app cannot be reopened afterward.

• An all-users installation applies automatic updates again. The elevated update step opened a second copy of the app as administrator instead of installing, and the verified download was thrown away once that copy closed.

• The tray icon's menu opens from the pointer upward, out of the notification area, the same way in every Killer app. A short menu no longer covers the tray icons and a taller one no longer floats about 40 pixels above them.

• Saving, flattening, extraction, printing, production layouts, Data Merge and current-document macros retain pending edits and page rotations. Incremental saves rebuild damaged cross-reference chains, including compressed and encrypted documents. Protection, batch resaves and optimization report repairs to broken references without claiming missing content was recovered. Failed or canceled document writes preserve existing outputs, with recovery copies retained after failed replacements; Save As and Extract Pages enforce the PDF extension (#433, #450).

• Close prompts protect active text and keep documents open after cancellation or save failure, including Windows sign-out and shutdown. Saving detects outside changes even when file size and timestamp match; browser downloads ask for a destination, splitting protects the source, and Bates batches reject output

1.8.91 fixes a crash when opening the theme picker in the packaged app and updates a vulnerable cryptography dependency.

Fixed

• Opening the theme picker and switching themes or accents no longer crashes the installed or portable app (#452).
• The bug report window uses the family text field and scrollbars, with grain clipped to the cards and a transparent scrollbar corner.

Security

• Updated System.Security.Cryptography.Pkcs to 9.0.21 for GHSA-846f-f764-76mx and GHSA-2fmv-rv2c-59x7.

1.8.90 improves saving, form printing, color selection, updates, and the family look.

Added

• Added a Film Grain switch to the theme menu. It is on by default, and turning it off removes the grain texture from every surface.
• Added Ctrl+wheel sizing in the file picker and links from the shortcuts panel to the online guide.

Changed

• Saving over a digitally signed PDF now asks first, because saving removes the signature.
• Tooltips and status messages read as plain sentences, and the Transform tooltip lists scaling, flipping and perspective correction instead of saying scaling is coming soon.
• The wordmarks use Punktype and Lacquer with a soft shadow on every theme, and the app, installer and website use Killer Sans in place of the typewriter font. The installer also matches the new family setup layout.
• Message, confirm, install and uninstall dialogs use the family setup dialog layout, with a notice icon, a larger Killer Sans heading, evenly sized buttons and the action button last. Dialog and installer action buttons are hollow in the accent color and fill with the button gradient on hover, instead of showing a solid block with hidden text.
• Hovered outline buttons and accent picker pills use gradients outside 98SE that start at the outline color and darken toward the bottom, and accent swatches lift on hover.

Fixed

• A failed Save or Save As no longer damages the existing file, because the new copy is finished before it replaces the file.
• Unsaved annotations survive moving, reordering, duplicating and merging pages and removing a link.
• Fixed color picker crashes with gradient themes (#442, #443) and a crash when Windows blocks the text extraction library (#441).
• Release packaging signs the application and engine DLLs and checks real window startup (#444), and updates no longer lock the installation folder (#434).
• Silent installs return specific Windows error codes and reject a second concurrent install instead of reporting a general failure.
• Icon-only buttons give screen readers the name from their tooltip, and controls reached with the keyboard show a dotted focus outline.
• Save As and Extract Pages append .pdf when a different filename extension is typed (#450).
• Inserting a blank page works again, and dragging one page of a multi-page selection moves the whole selection.
• Search highlights, text selection and Crop land in the right place on rotated pages.
• Print previews and output include current form field edits without a save and reopen.
• 98SE annotation bars no longer block input at zero height, and 98SE document tabs line up with the tab strip.
• Opening the split pane keeps the window on its own monitor, sliding it left when needed, instead of widening it past the edge of a secondary monitor.
• Closing the split pane returns the window to the width it had before it opened, and a window snapped to half the screen stays snapped and splits in place.
• Toolbar buttons return to their normal height after switching away from Text under icons.
• Menus fade again, and menus, submenus, flyouts, the shortcuts panel and the language menu line up with their controls and screen edges.
• Corrected theme colors, wordmarks, footers and dialog controls, including Light/Yellow, 98SE Red and the cream Blood, Greed and Cyanotic accents. Accent-colored toolbar icons keep a dark halo on Light/Yellow.
• App and title bar icons stay sharp at fractional DPI and app zoom, and the title bar icon is slightly larger.
• The repair prompt reads as plain sentences in every language.
• Corrected Vietnamese website translations and theme look counts.
• Centered website logos with space above and below, standardized fonts and spacing, refreshed Engine branding, and added a two-column Corpus layout.
• Corrected Help and Technical instructions, documentation navigation, current feature descriptions, and automatic Engine release facts.