ynotPDF

What it does today

Everything listed here is already built into ynotPDF. Features being worked on are listed separately at the end.

• Read and find

  • Open several PDFs at once, each in its own tab.
  • Single page, continuous, facing and book layouts; split view, full screen and a reading mode.
  • Night Mode, which darkens the page as well as the window.
  • Thumbnails, bookmarks, layers and attachments in a side panel.
  • Select and copy text, take a snapshot of an area, search, and print.
  • Open and save to your OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive folders — the synced folders already on your computer.
  • A plain-text view: the page's words in your own size and colours.
  • Search inside the files attached to a PDF, and inside a PDF Portfolio's own files — by their names, or inside their text.
  • Narrow a search by author, title, subject, keywords, file name and dates.
  • Find a word by its stem, so river also finds rivers — carefully: it never turns one word into a different one.
  • Put a searchable index inside the PDF itself, so a copy of the file can be searched anywhere, with nothing to build.
  • A screen reader can read the open document: headings, lists, tables, links, form fields and picture descriptions, in reading order, with the page spoken by its name.
  • Links land exactly where their destination points, including named destinations.
  • Show a PDF as a presentation: full screen, with auto-advance, loop, a slide transition and a background choice.
  • Follow a document's articles — the reading threads some magazine-style PDFs carry.
  • Reverse View: read the page order the other way round; it changes the view, never the file.
  • A live cursor readout: the pointer's position on the page, in the status bar.
  • Open two documents side by side; each scrolls on its own.
  • Print a bookmark's pages or a whole section with the range filled in, and print double-sided — long edge or short edge — where the printer supports it.
  • Layers keep their content when they are imported or merged, and return with an undo.
  • Read aloud reads a chosen radio option and a signature's own message as themselves.

• Comment and mark up

  • Highlight, underline and strike out text. Notes, typewriter text, text boxes and callouts.
  • Rectangles, ovals, lines, arrows, polygons and clouds; freehand ink with the Pencil and its eraser; custom stamps with optional transparency.
  • A comments panel with replies and status. Comments import and export as FDF and XFDF.
  • Measure distance, perimeter and area, to a scale you set.
  • Arrange comments: group them, align them on an edge or down the centre, space them evenly, or rotate them together; each change is one undo.
  • Measure angles and circles too — radius, diameter and circle area — and read a drawing's own scale from the file.
  • Stamp many pages at once, numbering each copy in sequence — Exhibit A, Exhibit B, and so on.
  • Export comments to Word: each comment becomes a Word comment, strikeouts become tracked deletions and inserted text tracked insertions; choose all comments, only ticked ones, or only the text edits.
  • Export selected comments as FDF or XFDF — or all of them — and import them into another copy.
  • Merge comments from several documents into one, keeping the newer of a pair.

• Organise pages

  • Insert, delete, extract, replace, rotate and move pages, and number them.
  • Combine files and split them. Crop pages, straighten crooked scans, and flatten.
  • PDF Portfolios: create them, edit them and take files out of them.
  • Split a document where its blank pages fall, or cut one page into strips.
  • Combine files with a contents page built from each file's bookmarks, and label each file's pages with its name.
  • Use a document's own page labels — i, ii, A-1 — in every page range, beside numbers, even and odd.
  • Move bookmarks between documents as an XML file: a branch or the whole tree.
  • Add files to a Portfolio from a scanner, the clipboard or a web page; search inside a Portfolio's files, and print one in the order you choose.
  • Insert pages from another file, a folder, a scan, a web page or the clipboard.
  • Page thumbnails work on macOS and Linux too.

• Change what is on the page

  • Select, move, resize and align the objects on a page.
  • Edit images and drawn shapes.
  • Headers and footers, Bates numbering, watermarks, backgrounds and links.
  • Find and replace, and spell check with your computer's own dictionary — on Windows, the Mac and Linux — with misspelt words still underlined in High Contrast.
  • Every change can be undone. Autosave, with recovery after a crash.
  • Repair a document's accessibility tags: change a tag's type, move or delete it, add a picture's description, set a table's header cells and fix the reading order — each one undo.
  • See what standard a file claims — PDF/A, PDF/X — and verify the claim in place; make a file compatible with an older PDF version.
  • Import, replace and export a document's details — title, author, subject, keywords — as XMP, with what will change shown first.
  • Watermarks can repeat across the page like security paper; a footer can carry your user name; a Bates number can step by any amount, forwards or backwards, with %BATES_NUMBER_KEY% wherever the running number should appear.
  • Select the words, press Edit, and change them where they are — no window opens; when you finish, the change is one undo, and Esc throws it away.
  • Edited text keeps its formatting, and numbered runs renumber correctly when 9 grows to 10.
  • Edit PDF shows every text block and picture on the page in one working surface: edit text where it lies, move or replace a picture, add text or a picture, and delete one. A scanned page is recognised when the mode opens.
  • Documents with long names save, even close to the system's limit; when the file cannot be written, the save failure says what went wrong in plain words and offers Save As… under another name.

• Forms

  • Fill in forms, and design your own: text fields, check boxes, radio buttons, lists and buttons.
  • Checks, formatting and calculations on fields. Import and export form data, and flatten a finished form.
  • Turn a flat form into one you can fill in: ynotPDF finds the fields for you.
  • XFA forms, in plain words: an older static XFA form — the kind most government forms use — can be filled in here, though some of its own calculations and checks may not run. One that needs Adobe's XFA engine is shown as pages, with a note to fill it in a program that supports XFA.
  • The form remembers what you typed in a single-line field and offers it back while you type; clear it whenever you like in Preferences.
  • A calendar opens under a date field, and Home, End and Escape behave as they should.
  • Fill and sign by hand: type text, add a tick or a cross, and flatten the form when it is done.
  • More of a form's own calculations and checks run here, in a safe engine of our own.

• Protect and sign

  • Passwords and permissions, with AES-256 encryption.
  • Every page of a protected or signed document shows a small icon at the top right that names its state when you rest on it, and opens the details when pressed; a screen reader reads the word. A file locked against changes says Protected — Restricted, and a refused action offers a button to enter the owner password.
  • Opening a PDF does not run dangerous programs or scripts. External links ask before they open, though you can turn that off; links to another page in the same document do not ask. A form's field scripts run while you fill in or calculate the form, in a sandbox that sees only the form's fields and never files or the network; changing a field recalculates the form. Dangerous attachments are refused by what they really are.
  • Signatures are checked strictly: a page changed after signing or a revoked certificate is reported, not passed. A broken signature shows the warning shape on the page icon; a document changed after signing clears the verdict and shows the ordinary check icon until you check again.
  • Encrypt a file for named people, using their certificates.
  • Add a handwritten signature or your initials.
  • Sign documents digitally, and verify digital signatures with certificates or a smart card: the Windows certificate store, the macOS Keychain, and smart cards and USB tokens on Linux.
  • National ID cards and USB security keys work through the store your computer already has — Spain's DNIe and FNMT certificate, Portugal's Cartão de Cidadão, and the Belgian, Estonian and Italian eID cards. The card's PIN is asked for in ynotPDF's own window.
  • Signed PDFs are checked when they open: the badge says Signed, Signer unknown, Signature not valid or Changed since signing.
  • Ask other people to sign (Signature Requests): place each signer's mark, send the document from ynotPDF, and follow who has signed. Signers use a page in their browser, with no account to make.
  • Redaction: remove text and pictures for good, and clean out hidden information.
  • Certify a document at the level you choose: no changes allowed, filling and signing, or comments too.
  • A "Lock document after signing" tick, so a certified file refuses later signatures, as the free Reader does.
  • Remember a default digital ID, and choose how often the passphrase is asked again — after a period, once per session, or every time.
  • Clear a signature from a field and sign it again; it is one undo, and the page says so.
  • Add copy recipients to a signature request, so people are kept informed without being asked to sign.
  • Encrypt to certificates from the computer's store or from your trusted list, not only from a file.
  • Check a signature against Adobe's Approved Trust List, so one from someone you may not know can still read as trusted; the list itself is verified first.
  • A FIPS-aligned mode: it limits the app to SHA-2 and AES and refuses RC4. It does not make ynotPDF a FIPS-validated module.
  • Search-and-redact with your own word lists, saved searches and partial words, with a redaction code and overlay words on each mark.
  • A managed machine can require encryption settings, and remembered passwords are sealed with the operating system's secure store, never in a plain file.
  • Say which web links a document may open: keep a list of sites its links may never reach, or, when only a few should, the sites they may.

• Create and convert

  • Make PDFs from images, web pages, the clipboard, HTML, Markdown and plain text.
  • Make scanned pages searchable with text recognition (OCR).
  • Scan a page straight into a PDF — on Windows, for now.
  • Export pages as images, text, HTML or RTF. Convert to PDF/A.
  • Export the tables ynotPDF finds as a workbook for Excel (Tables to Excel) — the whole document, or an area you drag over — with numbers and dates kept as numbers and dates.
  • When a conversion finishes, Show in Folder opens the folder with your file.
  • Check a document's health when it opens; see where its size is, make a smaller copy, prepare it for fast viewing on the web, and repair a damaged file into a new copy — the original is left alone.
  • Save a PDF as a PowerPoint deck.
  • Save a page or a picture as JPEG 2000 — lossless, and smaller than PNG.
  • Export just what you selected: Word, rich text, HTML, plain text or Excel.
  • Capture a web page with tags for paragraphs and headings, a header and footer, or as one long page.
  • Recognise text in scans, with the scanner's own settings, on Windows, macOS and Linux; mark a word the recogniser got wrong as "Not text", and it stays out of the text for good.

• Compare and automate

  • Compare two versions of a document.
  • Run the same steps over many files at once.
  • Compare only the pages you choose — old pages against new pages — so a chapter moved to the back does not disturb the rest.
  • Tables mode pairs rows and columns first, so a moved cell is not reported as a changed one.
  • Ready-made actions: protect, optimise for the web, recognise text, flatten, and add headers and Bates numbers — each one you can change before it runs.
  • Run recognition, redaction, signing or printing across a folder in one batch; and print from the command line on Windows, macOS and Linux. The command line needs a licence for any change.

• Make it yours

  • Four colour themes — try them below.
  • Make the whole interface larger, up to 200 %.
  • Longer choices in Preferences show a short name in the list, with the explanation underneath.
  • Change the keyboard shortcuts, and arrange the ribbon and toolbar.
  • ynotPDF is being translated into 36 languages. Translated and checked today: 34 — Afrikaans, Arabic, Basque, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Greenlandic, Hebrew, Icelandic, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Ukrainian, Welsh, Xhosa and Zulu, Inuktitut (syllabics) — with Help in all of them. Arabic and Hebrew are laid out right to left. On its first start ynotPDF follows your computer's own language, and uses English where that language is not yet available.
  • Make ynotPDF the default PDF app, from the installer or from Preferences.
  • Reopen the documents that were open when ynotPDF last closed, each back on its page and zoom.
  • Follow the computer's light or dark setting — including Windows High Contrast — and change with it without a restart.
  • A touch mode: wider spacing and larger targets for fingers, without moving anything to a new place.
  • Turn graphics acceleration off if pages flicker or smear; the change applies on the next start.
  • The Free Reader needs no licence: read, search, print and listen. It also reads notes and comments, opens attachments, checks signatures, and browses, previews or takes files out of PDF Portfolios. It cannot edit, comment or sign, and it has no Help assistant. Activating this computer adds editing and signing, on two computers at a time; you can move a place to another computer whenever you need to.
  • Check for updates when ynotPDF starts; a found update downloads in the background and installs when you close ynotPDF, or at once with Install and restart. The update feed is verified, and the downloaded file's SHA-512 is checked before it is offered for install. A managed machine's policy decides only the background download; the update still installs when you close ynotPDF or choose Install and restart.
  • The Help assistant on licensed computers: ask how to do something and get numbered steps that name the Help pages used, with the passage quoted word for word or the page opened in Help. Your question and language are sent, with the same licence check the app uses — never your document. A Free Reader does not show it.
  • Preview PDFs in Windows Explorer, and use right-click verbs to convert or combine.
  • Polish is now one of the interface languages.

Four themes, the same as the app

ynotPDF comes with four colour themes. This page uses the same four, with exactly the same colours, so you can try them here.

Graphite

The default. Dark: near-black surfaces, white text and icons, blue accent.

Midnight

Pure black, dark-blue panels, gold text, white borders.

Daylight

Light grey, with no pure white. Black text, set heavier. Deep-blue accent.

High Contrast

Pure black, white and yellow. Thick borders, no greys.

If your system is set to light, this page starts in Daylight. If it asks for more contrast, it starts in High Contrast. Otherwise it starts in Graphite, like the app.

Made to be read

• In every theme, text contrast is at least 4.5 : 1 against its background, and icon and border contrast at least 3 : 1. Every build is checked, and rejected if a colour breaks the rule.
• Nothing is told apart by colour alone. A status is always a word and an icon, and the colours never rely on red against green.
• Nothing is see-through: menus, panels and dialogs are solid.
• A focus ring you can see on every control, drawn in two colours so it shows up on any background.
• The whole interface scales from 100 % to 200 %.
• Read aloud: ynotPDF reads a page, a selection or the whole document with your computer's voices, and keeps the sentence being read in view. Its speed and volume are shown in per cent — 100 % is the voice's normal speed and your system's own volume.
• Visual aids in the Accessibility tab, each off until you choose it: a reading ruler that marks the line you are reading, and a magnifier that follows the pointer and enlarges what is under it — from 1.5× to 8×, with an optional fisheye that keeps more of the line in view.
• Page colours: any text and background colour, off-white backgrounds, tinted pictures and scans, and a brightness control.

Being worked on

• More languages: Polish — the interface is translated; its Help pages are still being written.

Feedback and suggestions

Feedback and suggestions are welcome. Every report is read, bugs are fixed first, and every effort is made to include the features people ask for.

Send yours from the app with Help ▸ Send Feedback… or the Feedback button, use the support form on this website, or email us at support@ynotpdf.com.

If a word or a label is translated wrongly, right-click it in the app and choose Report a translation mistake…. The report carries the language and the place it came from.