Changelog

What changed since 1.0.0:

• Sign. Your own signature — the scanned squiggle, the “received on __/__”, the seal — lands on the sheet wherever you want it: drag the image over the page beside you and it drops there. Pick the width, drop the opacity when the scan’s background is white, and sign only the sheets you selected. The image is kept in Settings; and it never goes into a recipe, because a recipe is made to be sent to other people. It is still a visual signature — not a digital signature with a certificate, and the app says so on screen.
• Page size. Merging an A4 with a Letter and a phone photo used to hand you a document of uneven sheets that no print shop accepts. Under How the file comes out there is now a choice: keep each sheet’s size, all A4 or all Letter — fitted without cropping anything, and without stretching the landscape page.
• Export text (.txt). The recognition you already paid for can now leave the app: one text file per recognised document, to paste into an email or throw at a search box. Only what went through OCR in this session comes out — the app never runs recognition behind your back to fill the list.
• The CSV index gained the first lines. The desk’s spreadsheet (name, pages, size) now also carries the beginning of each recognised document’s text. A document that never went through OCR leaves the column empty, and the screen says why.
• Trial: 15 days or 20 documents — whichever runs out last. Counting calendar days alone threw out exactly the person who buys this app: the one who installs it on a hectic Tuesday, sorts out that day’s contract and comes back in September. Now both clocks run together. And when the trial ends, the app does not slam the door in your face: the desk stays laid out, the numbers stay real, the preview keeps drawing — what the purchase unlocks is writing the file.
• Forms and bookmarks stay alive. An application form with fillable fields used to leave the desk with the drawing of the form and none of the fields, silently. Now they cross over; and when a file is touched by nothing, it comes out byte for byte as it went in. When something really does force the pages to be rebuilt, the warning says so first — naming the file at risk, not a generic sentence.
• Cancelling no longer deletes what already came out. Stopping halfway through a big batch used to delete the finished files already sitting in your folder — hours of recognition vanishing because you asked it to stop. Now whatever reached the destination stays; only the piece being written at that instant is discarded.
• Much faster on big paperwork. Saving twice stopped re-recognising everything; the desk stopped redrawing the world on every rotation; selecting 2,000 pages at once stopped freezing the window; and a photo thumbnail is no longer decoded three times to appear once.
• The full sheet. A double click on a thumbnail (or the Z key) opens the page full screen — because deciding whether that sheet stays or goes means reading it. ← and → turn the pages, + and − zoom, 0 fits to screen, Home and End jump to first and last, and Esc closes.
• Undo a generation from the keyboard. The toast that appears after generating answers Ctrl+Shift+Z (the generated files go to the Recycle Bin — never the originals) and it waits for you: its clock stops while your keyboard focus is inside it, and it stays longer on screen for anyone who turns on “reduce motion” in Windows.
• History became an exit. Every row now opens the folder the file landed in — and reveals the file in Elegant File Explorer when it is installed. Before, you could read where a file went, never go there.
• The stamp lands where you told it to. Choosing “every sheet” stamped only the first of each document while the bar promised the full number. Now the bar’s promise, the dialog’s sentence and the generated file all say the same thing.
• More honest compression. The “(compressed)” name only stays on the file when it actually shrank; documents with special colour spaces stopped coming out with their colours swapped; and the app once again offers resampling for a scan that will not shrink at all, always saying first that sharpness drops and that the text becomes an image.
• A new password is asked for twice. The password that locks a file is the product’s only irreversible secret: one typo had no fix. Now there is a confirmation, with an eye to check what you typed.
• “It will fit, but it will be tight.” Before a big batch the app looks at the disk space and says exactly that, instead of finding out halfway through.
• It runs windowless, for people who automate. elegantpaper --ocr contract.pdf and elegantpaper --compress contract.pdf do the job, write the new file next to it and exit — with no desk. That is what turns the scanner folder into one line of a .bat, with no cloud and no background service. There, compression is the lossless path only.
• The index spreadsheet does not become a formula. A file name starting with = stopped turning into a calculation in the Excel of whoever received the CSV.
• The right window owns the dialog. The folder picker asked for from inside Settings was born behind them and vanished on the first click. And “Text size” now scales the window along with the text — at 150%, dialogs stopped clipping their own content.
• Three languages, two themes and two shapes, as always — now with the Classic/Modern axis reaching the title bar of the dialogs too.
• What 2.0 still does NOT do. We do not edit the text inside a PDF, we do not fill in or create forms (we do preserve the fields that already exist) and we do not sign digitally with a certificate — signing here means putting your own signature on the page. Redaction does not exist yet. Compression only touches the images inside the file, scanning depends on your scanner’s driver, and straightening applies to photos and scans, not to a page already inside a PDF.

Everything the app did on launch day:

• The workbench. PDFs, JPG, PNG and HEIC land in the window and every page becomes a thumbnail. Drag to reorder — one page or twenty at once. Rotate, delete, insert a blank page, extract pages and export every page as a PNG are gestures on the desk, not items buried in a menu.
• The scissors. One click between two thumbnails marks where one document ends and the next begins. You can also split by ranges (“3–7, 12–20”) or into one file per page.
• Merge. As many documents as you like into one, in the order they sit on the desk. Coming from Elegant File Explorer, the order is the one you selected — not the alphabetical one.
• Make searchable (OCR). An invisible text layer slides under the scan and Ctrl+F starts finding words on a photographed page. In batch, with page-by-page progress and a cancel button that really cancels. It runs on the recognition engine already inside Windows: 100% offline.
• Compression in three honest steps. Each step shows the estimated size before you choose. When the file is pure text, the app says it will barely shrink instead of pretending otherwise. A scan that will not shrink at all gets a second path: the app offers to resample the pages, telling you first that sharpness drops — never on its own.
• Photos → PDF and PDF → images. The fourteen receipt photos from your phone become one document; a document becomes PNGs when that is what someone asked for.
• Scan straight from the scanner. The app talks to the device through the service already in Windows: pages land on the desk as images and the PDF is only born when you say so. Feeder batches count sheet by sheet and can be cancelled. With no scanner on the PC, the command simply does not appear.
• Straighten a crooked photo. The app measures the tilt by geometry — no AI, no guessing — and writes a straightened copy. If the page is already straight, it says so and generates nothing. The original is never touched.
• Paperwork recipes. Save the steps you always repeat — “make searchable, compress, number” — and apply them to the whole desk later, with progress and cancel. A recipe is a readable .efepaper file: double-clicking it opens a preview listing the steps, nothing runs by itself. A password never goes into a recipe.
• Passwords and metadata. Add a password, remove the one you know, and strip the author, the producing program and the history the file carries around without you knowing.
• The result bar. Always visible, always with real numbers before anything happens: “You will generate 2 files · 14 pages · 3.1 MB, was 8.7 MB · the original is not changed.”
• The original is untouchable. The output is always a new file next to the old one; a repeated name gets a suffix and nothing is ever overwritten. The 12-second toast with Undo sends the generated files to the Recycle Bin — never the originals.
• With Elegant File Explorer installed, three extra things. The file it created opens already selected in its folder, inside the house file manager; a search hit on page 47 becomes a button that opens the document scrolled right there; and Paper writes a rule that files what the scanner spits out on its own — it arrives disabled, with a preview, on the other side. From that side, selecting PDFs in EFE and choosing “Merge into one PDF…” opens the desk already laid out. Without EFE none of this shows up, and nothing is missing.
• Three complete languages on launch day — Portuguese, English and Spanish, switching without a restart.
• Two themes × two shapes — Light/Dark/Automatic colour and Classic/Modern shape, with the same design as Elegant File Explorer.
• An illustrated manual inside the app, in your language, with its own chapter for known limits and for privacy.
• Nothing leaves your PC. There is no internet client in the code. Turn the Wi-Fi off and the app works the same — and that is the fastest way to check.