Crop PDFs in browser or portable Windows app

Wuqiong Zhao's pdfcrop Web App is sublimely fit to purpose. Tried wrangling a Tauri-based portable Windows app out of it with Claude 4.6 Opus, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT 5.4 over several hours with little to show for it.

Dear friend and AI whisperer citricguy adroitly conjured up a wonderful solution using Copilot & GPT-5.4-high in a twinkling, even fixing crop-box handle resizing along the way.

Used these build steps in Windows 11 24H2 ARM64:

1. Install prerequisites

• Git
• Visual Studio 2026 (select "Desktop development with C++")
• Rust
• Node.js
• wasm-pack (wasm-pack-init.exe)

2. Install LLVM/Clang

winget install LLVM.LLVM --source winget
set PATH=C:\Program Files\LLVM\bin;%PATH%

3. Configure Rust

rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown
cargo install tauri-cli --locked

4. Clone and enter the repo

git clone https://github.com/citricguy/pdfcrop.github.io-tauri/
cd pdfcrop.github.io-tauri\pdfcrop\examples\pdfcrop.github.io

5. Install JS dependencies

npm install

6. Build WASM package

wasm-pack build --target web --release --out-dir pkg

7. Compile the EXE

npm run desktop:build

Related

• Cropping PDFs
• Optimizing PDFs for E Ink displays
• Batch crop a stack of visually overlaid images like Briss
• Delete content cropped from PDFs in Preview

❧ 2026-04-10