Announcing indiPDF 2.2: Edit the Page Itself, Adobe XFA Forms, and Batch Conversion

indiPDF 2.2 is out today, and it’s a big one. Since 2.0 we’ve added a way to edit the page’s own drawing rather than layering annotations on top of it, support for Adobe’s XFA forms, batch conversion, paragraph re-wrapping — and a long list of smaller improvements driven almost entirely by things people wrote in to tell us.

As always: no cloud, no subscription, no telemetry. Every one of these runs entirely on your own computer.

Edit the Page Itself

This is the one people have been asking for.

Until now, editing a PDF in indiPDF meant working on top of the page — annotations, highlights, text laid over what was already there. The new object tool (the shapes icon in the toolbar) works with the page’s own drawing instead: the lines, boxes, shapes, images and text that the document is actually made of.

Click a line, a box, a shape or an image to select it. Drag a band across the page to grab everything it touches — enough to pick up a whole system of music, a table, or a block of a diagram in one go. Shift-click adds and removes, Ctrl+A takes the page. Then drag the selection to move it, delete it, copy it with Ctrl+D, or send a copy to another page entirely.

Selection follows the real shape rather than a bounding box, so a hairline rule or a staff line is as easy to click as anything larger. Text is included too — a word, a notehead, a symbol can all be moved, copied or deleted like any other element. (Changing what text says still belongs to the text tool.)

This came from several people wanting to rearrange sheet music, diagrams and architectural plans, and it’s been sharpened considerably in 2.2: selection outlines now sit exactly on what they’re outlining on every kind of page, moving elements is smooth even on pages carrying thousands of them, and Undo steps back through your changes as it should.

Adobe XFA Forms

If you’ve ever opened a form from a tax office, a municipality or an insurer and been met with a grey page reading “this document requires Adobe Reader 8 or higher”, you’ve met XFA — Adobe’s own form format, where the form exists only as XML that a reader has to assemble.

indiPDF now assembles it. The form appears with its fields, labels and dropdowns where they belong, and you can fill it in, save it, and print it. What you type is written back into the form’s own XML, exactly where Adobe’s software looks for it, so the file you send on is a properly filled-in form — not a flattened picture of one.

Two things worth knowing, and indiPDF tells you both on screen rather than leaving you to find out. A form that works out its own values — a running total, a tax, a due date — won’t calculate them here, since those are written in Adobe’s own scripting languages; indiPDF flags forms with such fields so you know to check them before sending. And because an XFA form is a form rather than a page of print, the annotation and page tools don’t apply to it; they’re switched off with an explanation rather than left to fail quietly.

Batch Convert

Tools → Batch Convert does one thing to a lot of documents. Pick files or point it at a whole folder, choose what to turn them into — Word, Writer, Excel, Calc, plain text, or a compressed PDF — and choose where the results go.

Each document is converted on its own, so one that’s damaged or unreadable is reported against its own name and the rest carry on. A run of three hundred tells you which three went wrong, rather than stopping dead at the first. Nothing already in the destination folder is overwritten: a name that clashes is numbered. And it needs no document open, because it picks its own.

Edit a Whole Paragraph

Right-clicking selected text now offers Edit Whole Paragraph alongside Edit.

Editing a word covers it and draws a replacement on top — which works beautifully until the replacement is longer than what it replaced and runs past the margin, because the line never re-breaks. Editing the paragraph re-breaks it. Change a figure, correct a phrase, rewrite a sentence, and the lines reflow to fit the space the paragraph already occupies.

Where the result genuinely needs more room than the paragraph had, indiPDF tells you how many lines over it is rather than letting it overflow unnoticed. The text is yours — we’d rather report the problem than refuse the edit.

Try Before You Buy, Properly

Documents saved with an unlicensed copy carry a watermark. That’s fair enough — but until now it was permanent, so anyone who trialled indiPDF, did real work, and then bought a licence was stuck redoing it.

Not any more. Licensed copies get Tools → Remove indiPDF Watermark, which takes off all of it: the mark on the page, the link sitting in the middle of it, and the note left in the document’s properties. On documents watermarked by 2.2 or later, removal is exact. Files stamped by an earlier version have nothing identifying the watermark, so indiPDF matches on the wording instead and says so plainly before touching anything — a good match rather than a certain one, and we’d rather tell you which you’re getting.

Evaluate the software on your real work. If you buy, your work comes with you.

Everything Else

A great deal of 2.2 is the unglamorous kind of improvement that comes straight from the inbox:

Encrypted documents just open. Files locked with AES-256 — the standard most software has used for years — now open and ask for your password once, in place of any error rather than after a run of them. Documents encrypted only to restrict printing or copying continue to open without asking at all.
Filled forms print. Everything you’ve typed into a form now appears on the paper and in image exports, drawn onto the page so every printer and viewer shows it. Saving is unchanged — the form stays fillable.
Printing on Windows now goes through the print spooler directly, rather than relying on another program being registered to handle PDFs. A great many machines have none.
Replaced text matches the page. Editing text reads the paper and ink colours from the page itself and matches the original’s typeface, weight and slant, instead of assuming black Arial on white.
Dropdown fields show your choice — both the “Select” prompt when nothing is chosen and your saved selection when it is, in the viewer and in the form-field editor.
Large documents stay quick. The document is held open while you work on it rather than being sent back and forth for every change. On a 65 MB file that’s the difference between several seconds per edit and a fraction of one.
Messages say what happened. Where something goes wrong, indiPDF now tells you what — printing, repair, OCR, compression, encryption, signing and scanning all report properly.

How to Update

If you’re on Flathub, the update will arrive automatically. AppImage, DEB, and RPM packages are on our downloads page.

flatpak update com.indomitusgroup.indipdf

indiPDF remains a one-time purchase of $35 with free updates for life. No subscriptions, no cloud dependencies, no data collection. Your documents never leave your computer.

Nearly everything above started as an email from someone using indiPDF on real work — a form that wouldn’t open, a file that wouldn’t decrypt, a page of sheet music that needed rearranging. Please keep them coming. This release is better for every one of them.