About PDFMango

Why PDFMango

I often need to do simple things with PDFs: put the pages in the right order, turn a page that is the wrong way round, join two documents, or make a large file small enough to send by email. Every time I looked for a tool for this, I ended up with something full of ads, cluttered with features I did not need, wanting me to upload my documents to someone else's server, or working on only one platform. I could not find one that I felt was reliable, safe, modern and simple, all at the same time.

So I decided to have one built. PDFMango brings together well-established open-source PDF libraries, and I used Claude AI to design and develop it. Your files never leave your device; all the work happens inside your browser. There are no ads, no sign-ups and no clutter, and it works the same way on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iPhone.

PDFMango is completely open source. The full source code is on GitHub, free for anyone to use, learn from, improve and benefit from.

How to use

1. Drop PDFs or JPG/PNG images onto the page, or press Choose files.
2. Drag pages into the order you want (on a phone, press and hold a page, then drag).
3. Select pages to rotate or delete them; with nothing selected, the toolbar acts on every page.
4. Press Download and pick a compression level: Lossless keeps everything, Balanced and Strong shrink photos, Scan makes the smallest file.
5. Your new PDF downloads straight to your device. Change anything and download again whenever you like.

Privacy and analytics

PDFMango uses Google Analytics to count anonymous visits to the live site. Nothing about your files (their names, contents, pages or sizes) is ever collected or sent anywhere; your PDFs and images are processed entirely inside your browser. Analytics runs only on the live site (never while testing locally), waits until the app has fully loaded, and skips itself automatically if you are offline or your browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal. Google sets its own first-party cookies to measure traffic; see Google's privacy policy for details. PDFMango's full source is open on GitHub.

PDFMango sets no cookies. If you change its Settings, only those choices are saved in your browser (Reset removes them); nothing about your files is ever stored. To work offline, your browser keeps a copy of the app's own code, never your files. When you turn a phone photo into a page, PDFMango also removes the photo's hidden details, such as its GPS location, without touching the picture itself.

Disclaimer

PDFMango is a free tool, built with AI assistance on open-source libraries, and is provided as is, without warranty of any kind. Always keep a copy of your original files. All names, logos and trademarks belong to their respective owners.

Open source

The complete source code is on GitHub at github.com/venkatarangan/pdfmango, under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0.

PDFMango is built on:

• MuPDF.js by Artifex Software — the PDF engine (AGPL-3.0)
• Svelte and Vite (MIT)
• SortableJS — drag and drop (MIT)
• Comlink — talking to the background worker (Apache-2.0)
• vite-plugin-pwa and Workbox — offline support (MIT)
• Material Symbols — icons (Apache-2.0)

The mangoidiots name and logo are Venkatarangan Thirumalai's own branding.

Built with AI

PDFMango was generated with Claude Opus 5.5, Anthropic's AI model, working in Claude Code. Venkatarangan Thirumalai wrote the specification and made the product decisions; Claude designed and wrote the code, the tests and this documentation, tested the PDF engine before building on it, and checked its work with automated tests on desktop and phone layouts.

Everything is open: the original plan, the prompts used to build it and the engine spike findings are in the source repository, so anyone can see exactly how it was made.