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Community
PdfCraft is part of ArtCraft. Come say hello, get help and follow development:
The ArtCraft name and logos in docs/brand/ are trademarks of the ArtCraft Team and are not open source. They may be used only unmodified, and only as part of PdfCraft (see docs/brand/LICENSE-brand.txt). Forks and modified versions must remove them.
Highlights
Faithful
Real-world typography: world scripts, vertical Japanese, colour emoji, gradients, soft masks and transparency. All of it renders the way the author intended.
Fearless
Ordinary saves append your changes and leave the original bytes untouched. Edits to damaged objects whose xref and header generations disagree use a full rewrite, keeping both accepted references connected to the same repaired object. Writes are atomic, undo runs deep, and nothing is lost if you close by mistake.
Yours
No account, no telemetry, no cloud. It works offline and opens instantly. The engine, CLI and app are all open source.
Read anything, beautifully
PdfCraft renders PDFs with care for the details that make a page feel right: kerning and ligatures, right-to-left and complex scripts, vertical CJK, colour emoji, shadings, blend modes, soft masks and optional content.
- Deep zoom stays sharp. Large pages render in tiles, so text stays crisp at any magnification.
- Built to survive bad files. Every page renders in isolation and damaged documents are repaired. Across the 983-file pdf.js test corpus the result is 0 crashes.
- Layouts for every task: continuous, single page, two-up, view rotation, full screen and a distraction-free Read mode.
- Light and dark themes, both designed to be easy on the eyes for long sessions.
Find it, select it, copy it
Search the whole document as you type, step through matches with ⌘G, and select text that comes out in the right reading order. That holds for columns, right-to-left runs and CJK too.
Navigate long documents
Launch with pdfcraft --two-paged file.pdf (or pdfcraft file.pdf --two-paged) to open each command-line PDF in noncontinuous two-page view. This optional launch override does not change saved default-layout preferences or PDFs restored from the previous session. An explicit --layout option takes precedence on the active document regardless of argument order; --default-layout retains its existing behavior for subsequently opened documents.
Right-click a PDF tab to close it, reopen the last closed file-backed tab, or reveal its file. Closing still asks about unsaved changes. Reopening reads the saved file from disk; it does not restore discarded edits. Reveal selects the file in Explorer or Finder. On Linux and FreeBSD it requests org.freedesktop.FileManager1.ShowItems, falling back to opening the containing directory with xdg-open when that service is unavailable. Reopen and Reveal are unavailable on the web; Reveal is also unavailable for pathless documents.
Bookmarks, page thumbnails and the document's own page labels (i, ii, 1, 2…) keep you oriented in long documents. Search bookmark titles in the Bookmarks panel to find nested entries even when their parents are collapsed. Matches keep their ancestors for context; Clear restores the unfiltered tree without changing its expansion state.
In Inspector > Pages, use Thumbnail size and the smaller/larger buttons to show more pages or inspect larger previews (50–150%). This changes only the thumbnails, keeping multi-page selection and the current page in view. The size belongs to the open document view and survives reloading its file; it is not remembered after restarting. Agents can set it with ui.set {"key":"thumbnail-zoom","value":"75"} and read active.thumbnail_zoom from ui.state.
Organize pages like cards on a table
Open Organize pages to see every page at once:
- Select pages: click, ⌘-click or ⇧-click.
- Change them: rotate, delete, insert blank pages, insert pages from another file, and move them earlier or later.
- Undo anything: ⌘Z, then save.
Undo that goes the distance. Each change is one step in a history you can walk backwards and forwards. The Edit menu names the step ("Undo Rotate pages"), and undo still works after you save.
Saves you can trust:
- Incremental: the original bytes stay byte-for-byte intact.
- Atomic: the file is written to a temporary copy, then swapped in.
- Verified: independently checked with qpdf, on every CI run.
When open documents exceed the window width, scroll over the tab strip with the mouse wheel or trackpad, or use its horizontal scrollbar. Opening or switching to a document brings its tab into view.
Unsaved documents carry a dot on their tab, and closing or quitting asks before anything is lost. Changes are autosaved every minute. If PdfCraft ever quits unexpectedly, it offers to recover your work the next time it opens. Encrypted documents stay encrypted on disk.
Combine and split without losing a thing
Combine files merges any number of PDFs into one. Each file gets a bookmark, with its own bookmarks nested underneath.
Extract copies the pages you select into a new document. Split divides a document every n pages, or before the pages you choose.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
