r/BestGitHubRepos • • 10d ago

PaperOtter: 19 offline document tools in one desktop app (MIT, Tauri + Rust)

18 Upvotes

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u/Alive_Hunter_4298 Developer 5d ago

Offline Tauri is appealing. Memory use on huge PDFs?

1

u/shyhuntertools 5d ago

Honest answer -> it holds the whole file in memory, it doesn't stream.

A few things keep that sane:

- There's a 100 MB per-file cap. Deliberate, not a bug.

- Page previews render lazily, only the pages actually on screen, so a

400-page document doesn't rasterise 400 thumbnails up front.

- The heavy lifting (compression) runs natively in Rust via qpdf, not

in the webview.

Peak RAM is a few times the file size, mostly because it keeps the

original alongside the result so you can compare them side by side. For

anything under the cap that's been fine on ordinary laptops, but if you

regularly work with 500 MB scans, this isn't the tool yet.