Glyphst Reader

Features

• Sharp at any zoom. Pages are drawn from their vectors on the GPU, so text and line art stay crisp however far you zoom, and zooming glides.
• Translation that keeps the layout. Translate a whole document, the pages as you read them, or a selection. The translation is set into the page in place, or shown side by side with the original; hover a block to see its partner. Uses DeepL, Google or Microsoft Translator.
• An assistant that reads along. Ask about the page, a selection or a figure, and get answers that cite their pages. Bring your own model (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek or any compatible API) or agent (Claude Code, Codex, Pi or any ACP agent).
• A library that files itself. Folders, collections and tags, search by words or by meaning across every document, and suggested collections and related papers. The library lives on your computer.
• Made for long reads. Tabs and split panes, a ctrl+tab book switcher, outline, bookmarks, highlights and notes, two-page spreads, rotation, a page overview and back and forward through links.
• Present from it. Full screen with a pen, highlighter, laser and timer.
• Read from the couch. A gamepad mode with its own home and a reading ring on the right stick.
• Make it yours. Themes from your wallpaper, page tints, shader effects for page turns and backgrounds, a transparent window, and every shortcut configurable, with a Vim keymap.

Download

Get the package for your computer from the latest release.

System	File
Linux, x86_64	glyphst-reader-<version>-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
Linux, ARM64	glyphst-reader-<version>-linux-aarch64.tar.gz
macOS 11 or newer, Apple silicon	glyphst-reader-<version>-macos-aarch64.dmg
Windows 10 or newer, x64	glyphst-reader-<version>-windows-x86_64-setup.exe
Windows 10 or newer, ARM64	glyphst-reader-<version>-windows-aarch64-setup.exe

Windows also has glyphst-reader-<version>-windows-<arch>.zip, the executable alone, which runs without installing. SHA256SUMS in each release lists the files' checksums.

The Reader runs on distributions with glibc 2.31 or newer (Ubuntu 20.04, Debian 11, Fedora 32 and later) and needs a Vulkan or OpenGL driver. The archive holds bin/, the desktop entries and the icons, so extracting it into ~/.local installs it for you, with Glyphst Reader in your applications and in Open With for PDF and EPUB:

tar -xzf glyphst-reader-*-linux-x86_64.tar.gz -C ~/.local --strip-components=1
update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications
glyphst-reader paper.pdf

(glyphst-reader runs from the shell when ~/.local/bin is on your PATH.) With Nix: nix run github:glyphst/glyphst -- paper.pdf.

Open the disk image and drag Glyphst Reader to Applications. The app is not notarized yet, so macOS stops it the first time: Control-click it in Applications, choose Open, then Open again. Or remove the quarantine mark once:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Glyphst Reader.app"

Glyphst Reader then appears in Open With for PDF and EPUB documents.

Run the setup; it installs for you alone, without asking for an administrator, and adds Glyphst Reader to the Start menu and to Open With for PDF and EPUB (Settings › Default apps can make it the default). Neither the setup nor the executable is signed yet, so SmartScreen may warn about them: choose More info, then Run anyway. Uninstall it from Settings › Apps.

Getting started

Open a document with Ctrl+O, by passing its path to the executable, or from the library on the home screen. A few keys to start with (Ctrl is ⌘ on macOS):

Key	Does
Ctrl+K	Command palette: every command, searchable
Ctrl+F	Find in the document
Ctrl+T	Translate the selection
Ctrl+L	Open the assistant
Ctrl+Tab	Switch between open books
+ / − / 0	Zoom in, zoom out, fit width
Z	Zen mode: only the page
P	Present
Ctrl+,	Settings

Settings › Keyboard shortcuts lists and changes every key, and "Keys: Vim" in the palette switches to the Vim keymap.

Translation and the assistant need a provider: add your key in Settings › Translation or Settings › AI. Fonts for translating into Chinese, Japanese or Korean, and the models for local search and OCR, download when first needed; Settings › Resources shows and manages them.

Contributing

Bug reports and ideas are welcome in issues. To build from source, run the checks or cut a release, see CONTRIBUTING.md; the architecture notes explain how the pieces fit.

Acknowledgements

Glyphst Reader is built on MuPDF (through mupdf-rs), egui, wgpu and Typst, with icons from Lucide. It also owes a great deal to projects we studied closely:

• MuPDF: besides opening and laying out every document, its rendering is the reference the GPU renderer is checked against.
• Highly-Efficient-PDF-Renderer: the model for drawing pages on the GPU and for smooth, sharp zoom.
• retain-pdf: the layout-preserving approach behind translation.
• Zed: the Reader began on its GPUI; Mermaid diagrams are adapted from its mermaid_render, and the release builds and fonts follow its lead.
• sioyek and zathura: the reading keys and the Vim keymap.
• Zeron: the assistant's chat, its small motions and Markdown tables.
• niri: following the desktop's theme and blur.

License

Glyphst Reader is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. The bundled fonts and icons keep their own licences, kept beside them in crates/ui/assets and crates/pdf-translation/fonts.

The screenshots show Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces (Albert Gu and Tri Dao, CC BY 4.0) and Zero To Production in Rust (Luca Palmieri).