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NullifyPDF - AI Privacy Edition

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NullifyPDF is a local-first PDF privacy tool. It helps detect personal data, redact it irreversibly, or replace it with reversible placeholders before a PDF is shared with third parties or uploaded to AI systems.

Tip

First time using NullifyPDF? Start with our User Guide — takes 5 minutes.

📋 Quick Overview

NullifyPDF goes beyond simple text covering. It uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) engines to identify entities like names, addresses, email addresses, IBANs, and credit card numbers. At export, the user chooses irreversible anonymization or reversible pseudonymization with an encrypted restore map.

🎯 Feature ✨ Benefit
🧠 AI-Powered Bilingual (EN/IT) automatic detection
🔐 Local-first No cloud uploads during PDF processing
⚡ Responsive UI Background scanning with live preview
🛡️ Privacy Export Irreversible redaction or reversible placeholders

✨ Key Features

  • 🧠 AI-Powered Redaction — Automatic bilingual (EN/IT) detection of PII: names, locations, emails, phones, IBANs, credit cards, crypto addresses
  • 🗄️ Fluid UI & Thread-Safe — PySide6 modern dark-mode interface with zero UI freezing. Text extraction in worker thread with QMutex serialization
  • 📖 Persistent Dictionaries — Blocklist and Allowlist synchronized to disk (~/.nullifypdf) with O(1) fast-path matching
  • 🛡️ Privacy Export Modes — Choose irreversible anonymization or reversible pseudonymization with a separately encrypted restore map
  • 🔎 OCR Support — Full builds bundle EN/IT Tesseract language data for scanned PDFs
  • 🖼️ Blindfold Mode — One-click image/logo censoring with professional placeholder: [ IMAGE REMOVED ]
  • 📦 Native Cross-Platform — Automated build scripts generate Windows .exe, macOS ZIP bundles, and Linux .deb/.rpm packages
  • 🎯 Drag & Drop Support — Native file drag-and-drop on main window
  • 📊 Logging & Diagnostics — Local file-based logging (~/.nullifypdf/logs/) with debug mode for advanced troubleshooting

⚠️ Tool Limitations

To keep NullifyPDF lightweight, 100% offline, and secure, be aware of these technical limits:

❌ Limitation 💡 Workaround
OCR availability Full builds include EN/IT OCR data. Lite builds require local Tesseract tessdata for scanned PDFs.
Handwritten Text NLP models cannot analyze non-digitized handwriting.
Password-Protected PDFs Encrypted documents are blocked at load. Decrypt before importing.
Digital Signatures Invalidated Privacy export changes the PDF; cryptographic signatures (PAdES, notarized) become invalid.

Warning

Digital signatures will be invalidated after redaction. Save unredacted originals separately for formal records.

🚀 Getting Started

📋 System Requirements

✅ Python 3.13 (required for PyMuPDF wheel compatibility)
✅ 2 GB disk space (dependencies + spaCy models)
✅ 4 GB RAM minimum (8 GB recommended for large PDFs)

Operating System Support:

  • ✅ Windows 10/11
  • ✅ macOS 11+
  • ✅ Linux (Ubuntu 20.04+, Fedora 33+)

⚙️ Installation

👤 End Users — Use Pre-Built Executable

Download the latest pre-compiled executable from Releases:

  • Windows Lite: NullifyPDF_vX.Y.Z_Windows_Lite.exe
  • Windows Full OCR: NullifyPDF_vX.Y.Z_Windows_Full.exe
  • macOS Lite: NullifyPDF_vX.Y.Z_macOS_Lite.zip
  • macOS Full OCR: NullifyPDF_vX.Y.Z_macOS_Full.zip
  • Ubuntu Lite/Full: NullifyPDF_vX.Y.Z_Ubuntu_Lite.deb or NullifyPDF_vX.Y.Z_Ubuntu_Full.deb
  • Fedora Lite/Full: NullifyPDF_vX.Y.Z_Fedora_Lite.rpm or NullifyPDF_vX.Y.Z_Fedora_Full.rpm

No installation needed on Windows/macOS - just run or unzip. Linux users can install the .deb or .rpm package.

👨‍💻 Developers — Install from Source

  1. Clone the repository

    git clone https://github.com/overwrite00/NullifyPDF.git
cd NullifyPDF

  2. Verify Python 3.13

    # Windows
py -3.13 --version

# macOS/Linux
python3.13 --version

  3. Run automated setup (recommended)

    python setup_env.py

    This script automatically:

    • Creates isolated virtual environment (.venv)
    • Installs all dependencies
    • Downloads spaCy language models (EN/IT)

  4. Activate environment & launch

    # Windows (PowerShell)
.\.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
python NullifyPDF.py

# macOS/Linux (Bash)
source .venv/bin/activate
python3.13 NullifyPDF.py

🤖 Automation Scripts

The repository includes cross-platform Python scripts for developers:

🔧 setup_env.py — Environment Setup

Configures development environment with Python 3.13, virtual environment, and NLP models.

python setup_env.py

What it does:

  • Detects OS (Windows/macOS/Linux)
  • Creates .venv with Python 3.13
  • Installs requirements.txt dependencies
  • Downloads spaCy models (English, Italian, both)

Automatic OS detection:

  • Windows: Uses py -3.13 launcher
  • macOS/Linux: Uses python3.13 directly
🏗️ build_local.py — Build Executable

Compiles standalone executable with PyInstaller.

python build_local.py --lite
python build_local.py --full

Features:

  • Cleans temporary directories
  • Auto-detects your OS
  • Reads version dynamically from code
  • Generates named executables such as NullifyPDF_vX.Y.Z_Windows_Lite.exe or NullifyPDF_vX.Y.Z_Windows_Full.exe

Linux bonus: On Ubuntu/Fedora, automatically builds .deb and .rpm packages in dist/

✓ Running Tests

Verify core behavior with smoke tests:

# Activate venv first
source .venv/bin/activate  # or .venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1 on Windows

pytest tests/ -v

Test coverage:

  • PDFListManager (blocklist/allowlist persistence)
  • Resource path resolution
  • OCR configuration helpers
  • Privacy placeholder and encrypted restore-map primitives
  • Build variant configuration

📚 Documentation

📄 Document 📖 Purpose
USER_GUIDE.md Step-by-step usage instructions
CONTRIBUTING.md How to contribute code & report issues
ARCHITECTURE.md System design & technical overview
DEVELOPMENT.md Local dev setup, testing & builds
OCR_SETUP.md OCR data setup and Lite/Full build notes
TROUBLESHOOTING.md Common issues & solutions
CHANGELOG.md Release history & updates

🔒 Security & Privacy

✅ 100% Local Processing — All analysis happens on your machine
✅ No Cloud Uploads — PDF processing stays local
✅ Open Source — Full code transparency
✅ No Telemetry — Zero user tracking

Important

Irreversible anonymization cannot be undone from the exported PDF. Always keep backups of original documents. Pseudonymization requires the encrypted restore map and its password.

See SECURITY.md for responsible disclosure and privacy details.

🛠️ Tech Stack

Technology Purpose
Python 3.13 Core language (required for PyMuPDF compatibility)
PySide6 (Qt6) Modern dark-mode GUI with multi-threading
PyMuPDF (fitz) High-performance PDF manipulation
Microsoft Presidio PII (Personally Identifiable Information) detection
spaCy NLP for entity recognition (bilingual EN/IT)
cryptography Encrypted pseudonymization restore maps

📝 License

MIT License — Free to use, modify, and distribute

Copyright (c) 2026 Graziano Mariella

See LICENSE for full text.

🤝 Contributing

Want to help improve NullifyPDF? See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

Last updated: 2026-07-23
User Guide →

About

NullifyPDF is a professional tool for forensic PDF anonymization. Designed for absolute privacy, it operates entirely locally using artificial intelligence to identify and permanently destroy sensitive data without ever uploading files to the cloud.

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cybersecuritycybersecurity-toolsdatalosspreventiondlpinfosecpdfpdf-anonymizationpdf-documentpresidioprivacyprivacy-focusedprivacy-protectionprivacy-toolsspacy

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