Why I built a Zero-Server PDF Editor with React & pdf-lib (and skipped WASM)

The Privacy Bottleneck Merging tax documents or signing contracts often forces a compromise: convenience vs. security. Standard free tools require uploading sensitive data to remote cloud servers, leading to potential data persistence and server log exposure. The objective: Zero data leakage. Files must never leave the local device. Engineering Decisions: Browser RAM vs. 500MB PDFs The common architectural choice for browser-side manipulation is WebAssembly (WASM). However, WASM introduces speci