TUESDAY, MAY 26, 2026

Desktop Editor Nears Launch

Desktop AppFor Drafting

The desktop editor: a split pane showing markdown source on the left and rendered preview on the right. — Staff Engraving / The Paperboy TimesThe Editor at his desk — markdown source on the left, the rendered page on the right, both updating in concert.

The Paperboy desktop editor is a native writing desk for markdown: a clean split-pane window where the source and the rendered page sit side by side, each updating as the other is changed. Built with Tauri, the binary is small enough to dispatch by telegraph.

It opens files via native dialogs, saves them locally, and converts any supported document the moment you drop it in. PDFs, Word documents, e-books, spreadsheets, images (with local OCR) — all become clean markdown with no round trip to a server.

Strict mode hides every chrome and leaves the writer with the page. Themes follow the system (or are set by hand). The whole thing fits in one window and gets out of the way.

Capabilities, Catalogued

Split-pane editor
Markdown source on the left, rendered preview on the right. Pane scroll stays synchronised; toggle between source-only, preview-only, or both.
Native file dialogs
Open and save via the OS’s own file picker. No web upload form, no browser sandbox, no cloud round trip.
Drop-to-convert
Drop a PDF, DOCX, EPUB, HTML page, spreadsheet, or image onto the window and Paperboy converts it in place. Local OCR for images via tesseract.js.
Markdown extensions
Full GitHub-flavoured markdown plus footnotes, definition lists, task lists, highlights, sub/superscript. The preview is faithful to common renderers.
Optional AI cleanup (BYO key)
If you configure a provider (Ollama locally, OpenRouter, an OpenAI-compatible endpoint), the editor can polish messy converted text. Nothing is enabled by default; you bring the key.
Tiny, native, offline
A Tauri binary, not an Electron blob. Works without network. Files never leave the machine unless you tell them to.

Distribution

Download (macOS, Windows, Linux)

Signed installers for macOS, Windows, and Linux ship from GitHub Releases. Until the first release is published, build from source via the repository.

» GitHub Releases (First release in preparation)

» Build from source

The desktop editor uses the same converter engine that powers the Chrome extension, the command-line edition, and the embeddable widget. One press, four mastheads.