Studio – a drag-and-drop PDF workspace for multi-document workflows

Hi HN, I'm the creator of LocalPDF (https://localpdf.online).

The thing I'm sharing here is Studio: https://localpdf.online/app/studio

Most PDF apps are built around isolated tools — merge, split, rotate, delete pages, edit text, and so on. That works fine for one-off tasks, but a lot of real PDF work isn't one-off. Usually it's more like: open a few files, compare them, pull pages from one into another, remove junk, reorder things, make a couple of edits, then export the result.

That workflow always felt awkward to me in traditional PDF editors because you keep bouncing between separate tools and separate screens.

So I built Studio around a different model — a drag-and-drop workspace for PDFs. Instead of doing one tool at a time, you can:

- Drop multiple PDF files into one workspace - Arrange documents on a canvas - Drag pages between documents - Copy, reorder, and delete pages - Edit inside the same working area - Export when you're done

Everything still runs locally in the browser on the user's machine — no file uploads, privacy by default, performance depends on the user's hardware, not a remote queue.

Under the hood: the UI is a canvas-style workspace, page operations are composed locally, and the output PDF is rebuilt on-device rather than sent to a backend for processing.

I've also been testing it on larger documents, because this kind of interface only matters if it still feels usable once the file stops being a tiny 3-page PDF.

What I was aiming for was something that feels less like filling out forms and more like actually working with documents.

I'd especially love feedback on: 1. Does this feel meaningfully different from existing PDF editors? 2. Is drag-and-drop organization actually a better mental model for PDF work? 3. If you work with large PDFs, what workflows would you stress test first?

Happy to answer technical questions too.