A real native PDF app on each operating system — proper menus, shortcuts, scrolling and accessibility — with one shared engine doing every document operation underneath. No web wrapper in a window.
Private beta — you'll be asked to sign in with an approved email address.
macOS 14 or later · 15 MB · signed and notarized · updates itself from here on
Where it stands
0.6.0 is out for testing, and it updates itself — later versions arrive as small deltas rather than a fresh download. The Mac app is the one you can get today; the shared engine already builds and is tested on Windows on every commit, and the native Windows app is the next piece.
| Compose ⇧⌘C | The reason it exists. Stacked, Grid and Packed layouts that trim each page down to its actual content and then pack the pieces together — now including dragging pieces where you want them, and an auto-crop for scans that trims to the paper's edge, straightens crooked pages and drops blank backs. Plenty of apps do basic n-up printing; none we found crop to content and pack in one step. |
| Page tools | Reorder, rotate, insert, extract, split, merge and protect — each one undoable, because a page tool you can't take back is a trap. |
| Fill and sign | Draw a signature or photograph one, then place it and nudge it until it sits straight on the line. It lives in your iCloud Drive, so your other Macs already have it. Text boxes go anywhere on the page. |
| Recognise text | A scanned page becomes selectable and searchable, done on your own Mac — the document never leaves it to be read. |
| Build a form | Place text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns, lists and signature fields, then set what each one shows, whether it is required, and how it looks. The result opens and works in Preview and Acrobat — this is making a form, not just filling one in. |
| Annotations and forms | Mark up, colour, comment and fill forms — fillable fields are lightly tinted so they stand out on a busy page — then flatten the result. A signed document keeps its signature intact: your notes are added after it, not over it. |
| Split view ⌥⌘\ | A second view beside the pages — the same document or another open one — with scroll-together for comparing two versions line by line. |
| Stamps | Approved, Draft, Void, Paid — drawn properly rather than pasted in, tinted so the page still reads through them, and rotatable to any angle. Make your own, and they follow to your other Macs. |
| Send a protected copy | Email a document that opens only with a password you send separately, without re-saving the original. |
| Finding your place | An outline sidebar, bookmarks for wherever you stopped reading, and a search that lists every match with its surrounding words across every open document. |
| Reading comfortably | Themes and text size, so a long document at night is not a white rectangle shouting at you. |
| One engine | Every document operation runs in a single shared core, so the Mac and the Windows app do the same thing to your file rather than drifting apart. |
| Your files stay yours | On-device by default. No account, no upload to open your own document, and any AI is local or explicitly switched on by you. |
| One purchase | Mac and Windows together, not twice. No nag screens, and a free tier that is actually useful. |
| Held to a speed budget | Tested on a corpus of real-world PDFs on every change, including a two-thousand-page file with targets for how fast the first page appears and how smoothly it scrolls. |
PDF Expert is the app to beat on the Mac and it skips Windows entirely, which is awkward if your work doesn't. The other direction — a cross-platform app built once and wrapped — gives up the thing that makes a Mac app feel like a Mac app. Doing it properly means a native front end on each system over one shared engine, which is more work and the only way to get both.