PDF Merger and Splitter Desktop App

Students constantly wrestle with PDFs: assignment pages scattered across files, a lab manual that needs only chapters 3–5, a project report assembled from three teammates' documents. Online merge tools upload your files to someone else's server and cap the free tier; desktop suites are overkill. This project is a focused desktop-style app for the two operations students actually need. The Merge view accepts dropped PDFs, parses each file's real page count from the PDF structure, lets the student reorder files and toggle which ones are included, then combines the selection into one document. The Split view takes one PDF and a list of page ranges — 1–12, 13–24 — validates them against the real page count, and produces one file per range. Everything runs locally in the app: downloads are genuine PDF files written by the app's own PDF writer, and a history view records every operation in the session. No uploads, no accounts, no watermarks.

1. The student drops PDF files onto the merge view; each file's page count is parsed from its internal structure.
2. Files are toggled in or out and reordered with up/down controls to set the merge sequence.
3. Clicking "merge selected" combines the chosen files in order and downloads the result as a valid PDF.
4. In the split view, the student selects one PDF and enters page ranges such as 1–12, 13–24.
5. Ranges are validated against the file's real page count; invalid ranges are rejected with an explanation.
6. Each valid range downloads as its own PDF file, and the operation is logged in the history view.

Tech stack:

• Python with a desktop GUI toolkit (delivered app)
• PDF structure parsing for page counts
• Minimal client-side PDF writer for downloads
• Interactive web prototype of the app flow (HTML/CSS/JS) for demonstration

• [Merge with reorder] Drop multiple PDFs, toggle inclusion per file, reorder with up/down controls, and merge the selection — the demo combines 3 files totalling 74 pages.
• [Real page-count parsing] Each dropped PDF's page count is read from the file's own structure (/Count), not guessed or typed.
• [Split by page ranges] Enter ranges like 1–12 or 13–38; the app validates them against the actual page count before splitting.
• [Genuine PDF downloads] Merged and split results download as real, openable PDF files written by the app's own minimal PDF writer.
• [Session history] Every merge and split is logged with file names, page counts and timestamps.
• [Sample documents preloaded] The demo ships with sample PDFs so every feature is tryable immediately.

• Complete desktop app source code (Python) implementing merge, split and history
• Interactive web prototype of the app flow (the demo shown in the screenshots)
• The app's PDF parsing and PDF-writing modules with comments
• Project report PDF (background, methodology, architecture, screens, testing notes)
• PPT presentation for final review
• Viva Q&A preparation document (PDF internals, page-count parsing, file generation)

• The demo's merge concatenates sample documents; the delivered app merges real uploaded PDFs page by page.
• The minimal PDF writer produces clean text-based PDFs; complex source layouts (forms, annotations) are out of scope.
• Encrypted or password-protected PDFs are not supported in the current build.
• The demo prototype runs in the browser; the delivered app is a Python desktop application.
• Very large PDFs (hundreds of megabytes) are outside the tested range.