PDFReader for Mac

Native macOS PDF reader built with SwiftUI + PDFKit as a Swift Package (no Xcode project required — builds with swift build / swift run).

Features (v1)

• Basic viewing — open PDFs, continuous / single / two-up layouts, zoom in/out + auto-fit, page navigation, thumbnail strip.
• Search + outline — full-text search with match list + highlight, table-of-contents navigation, per-file bookmarks (persisted).
• Annotations — highlight, underline, strikethrough, sticky notes with a switchable palette (yellow / green / blue / pink / orange / purple / red / teal / gray) plus an editable custom color (persisted). Build your own rotation shortlist (star colors in the color menu) and cycle through it with the Next Color button (⇧⌘C). Highlights apply automatically once a text selection settles, and the color advances to the next rotation color after every highlight. Undo / redo for annotation changes (⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z). Annotation list inspector with jump-to + delete.
• Saving — Save (⌘S) writes annotations back into the opened PDF; Save Copy exports an annotated duplicate.
• Recents — the Open menu keeps an Open Recent list (with Clear Menu); the welcome screen shows your recent files with relative dates. Missing files are reported and dropped on open.
• Reading modes — layout menu, book mode, RTL, night background, presentation (full-screen).
• Settings — ⌘, opens Settings; toggle "Remember where I left off in each file" (on by default) to control last-position restore.
• Updates — Help → Check for Updates… compares the build's version against the latest GitHub release and offers the DMG download.
• Themes — system / light / dark / sepia-style page themes from the toolbar; preference is persisted.

Requirements

• macOS 14+, Intel or Apple Silicon.
• For development: Swift 6 toolchain (Command Line Tools is enough).

Install

From released DMG (recommended)

1. Download PDFReader-vX.Y.Z-macOS-universal.dmg from Releases.
2. Open the DMG and drag PDFReader into Applications (or run it straight from the DMG to try it out).
3. First launch: the app is ad-hoc signed, so Gatekeeper may block it. Right-click PDFReader → Open → Open once — afterwards it launches normally. (Signing with a Developer ID + notarization removes this step; see scripts/.)
4. To uninstall: drag PDFReader from Applications to Trash, and optionally delete its preferences (~/Library/Preferences/com.example.pdfreader.plist).

From source (build + copy to Applications)

1. Clone the repo and install dependencies:

   git clone https://github.com/Marvelxy/PDFReader.git
   cd PDFReader
   swift build

2. Build the bundled app (required for macOS Tahoe+ cursor support):

   scripts/make-app.sh debug

3. Copy the app to Applications:

   cp -R .build/app/PDFReader.app /Applications/

4. First launch: right-click PDFReader → Open → Open once to overcome Gatekeeper's ad-hoc signature. (Or sign with a Developer ID
   • notarize for seamless launching.)

From source (swift run only)

Running swift run PDFReader launches a headless binary without the app bundle — useful for quick testing but not recommended for daily use because cursor styles and other AppKit-dependent features won't render correctly on macOS 15+.

Build & run

cd PDFReader
swift build
swift run PDFReader

# Open a sample immediately:
PDFREADER_SAMPLE=~/Downloads/sample.pdf swift run PDFReader

For normal use, run it as a bundled app (required on macOS Tahoe for cursors — resize handle, I-beam, etc. — to render; a raw swift run binary is stuck with the arrow pointer):

scripts/make-app.sh [debug|release]
open .build/app/PDFReader.app

Verification

swift run PDFReaderVerify   # headless checks, works with Command Line Tools
swift test                  # XCTest suite, requires full Xcode

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for setup, branch workflow, verification (swift build / swift run PDFReaderVerify / swift test), and code conventions.

Project layout

Sources/PDFReader/
  PDFReaderApp.swift      # @main SwiftUI App
  Models/
    PDFReaderState.swift  # document state, search, outline, annotations
    HighlightColor.swift  # switchable markup palette + tools
    BookmarkStore.swift   # persisted per-file bookmarks
  Views/
    ContentView.swift     # split view, toolbar, status bar
    PDFKitView.swift      # PDFView + PDFThumbnailView bridges
    SidebarView.swift     # pages / contents / search / bookmarks / notes
    AboutView.swift       # App menu → About
    SettingsView.swift    # App menu → Settings… (⌘,)
    Services/UpdateChecker.swift  # Help → Check for Updates…

Releasing

Releases are cut from version tags:

git tag vX.Y.Z && git push origin vX.Y.Z

CI builds the universal binary + DMG, stamps the app version from the tag (CFBundleShortVersionString), and creates the GitHub release. Don't create the GitHub release manually first — gh release create in CI fails if one with the same tag name already exists.

If git push fails mid-upload of the icon resources with send-pack: unexpected disconnect, raise the HTTP post buffer:

git config http.postBuffer 524288000

Notes

• PDFKit does the heavy lifting (PDFDocument, PDFView, PDFThumbnailView, PDFSelection, PDFAnnotation).
• Highlight colors map to NSColor so saved PDFs show the same color in Preview / other readers.
• Night mode darkens the window + viewer background. True per-page dark rendering would need custom page drawing — left for v2.

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Marvelous Akpotu.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, version 3. See LICENSE for the full text — distributed modifications must stay under the GPL.