Fubako 
Fubako
文箱 — "letter box" —
Named after the fubako (文箱), the traditional Japanese box for keeping letters safe. A fully local PDF toolbox for people who don't want Adobe on their Mac: make scans searchable, merge, compress, watermark, and convert to Excel — entirely on your Mac. Your files never leave your device.
macOS 14 (Sonoma)+ · Apple Silicon / Intel · Free · Notarized
Homebrew: brew install --cask supergodak/tap/fubako
Make scans searchable
Apple Vision OCR embeds an invisible text layer, turning scanned PDFs into searchable, copyable documents. Free, on-device, English and Japanese.
Merge, split, reorder
Acrobat-style page sidebar with drag-to-reorder, delete, rotate, and extract. Drop PDFs onto the sidebar to merge.
Smart compression
Three quality presets. Image optimization plus font subsetting — up to 80%+ reduction in our tests. If a file can't shrink, it's kept untouched.
Hard-to-remove watermarks
Watermarks and page numbers are baked into the page, not selectable text — they can't be stripped with a click.
PDF → Excel
Converts ruled tables into structured .xlsx, merged cells included (macOS 26+). Fully local — safe for confidential invoices.
Zero network, provable
A sandboxed app with no network entitlements at all. Anyone can verify it from the signed binary.
Why Fubako
You know who builds it
Developed by ATI Inc., a software development company in Japan. No ads, no accounts — and today's features stay free.
Verifiable
Released after external security review. The zero-network claim is enforced by macOS itself and verifiable with codesign.
No uploads, ever
Unlike web-based PDF tools, nothing is sent to any server — the app has no permission to talk to the network at all.
Guides
Roadmap
Fubako starts on macOS. Planned next (no dates promised):
- ■ iPad / iPhone — the full document UI on iPad; quick actions (compress, watermark, delete pages) from the share sheet on iPhone
- ■ Windows — same fully-local design
- ■ Simple redaction — true rectangle redaction, removed from the text layer as well
Privacy
Fubako processes everything on-device and sends nothing anywhere. It ships without any network entitlements, so "no data leaves your Mac" is verifiable from the signed binary itself.