macOS · Windows · version 0.2.0
Leaf reads PDFs and edits them properly: comments, text and pictures changed in place, forms, signatures, pages, passwords, redaction, OCR and compare. And it does all of it itself, with its own PDF engine.
Highlight, underline, strike out and insert text by dragging over it. Add sticky notes, text boxes and callouts, draw lines, arrows, rectangles, ellipses, polygons and clouds, write by hand, and stamp a page Approved. Every comment can be answered.
Double-click a paragraph and type. Leaf reflows the text inside its block and keeps the document's own font, so the page still looks like it did. Move, resize and rotate text, pictures and shapes, replace a picture, or add new ones.
Click a field and type, Tab to the next, tick the boxes. Draw your own fields when a form has none. Sign with your mouse or trackpad, your typed name, or a picture of your signature, and keep it for next time.
Compare two documents, or two versions of one, side by side. Changed words are boxed in red and green, changed picture areas too, the pages scroll together, and every difference is in a list.
Leaf recognizes the text in scanned pages and adds it under the picture, so you can find, select and copy it. The OCR is Leaf's own too: no system service, nothing sent anywhere. It reads English.
One page, continuous, two pages side by side or with a cover page, and full-screen presentation. Night mode turns pages dark for reading late, and Leaf follows your system's dark mode.
Organize, insert, delete, extract, rotate and crop pages, merge files, split one up, and set page labels.
Lock a document with AES-256 and choose what others may do: print, copy, change, fill in.
Redacted text, pictures and drawings are taken out of the file, not just covered with a black box.
A folder or a list of files at once: OCR, compress, merge, convert to images, protect or flatten.
Make a file smaller, or save its pages as images or its text as a text file.
Every change can be undone and redone, and Leaf asks before closing anything unsaved.
Most PDF apps are built on someone else's PDF library. Leaf does every part itself: reading the file, drawing the pages, the fonts, the pictures, the text you search and copy, and writing it all back. Every line is written in Tessel, a programming language for native desktop apps: about 90,000 lines and no outside libraries.
Damaged files, encrypted files (RC4 and AES), object and cross-reference streams.
Type 1, TrueType, OpenType and CFF, Type 3, and Chinese, Japanese and Korean fonts.
Its own JPEG, JPEG 2000, JBIG2 and CCITT fax decoders, and the color spaces print shops use.
Quick incremental saves, full rewrites that drop what's no longer used, and encryption.
Tested against nearly a thousand real-world PDFs, page by page, against other readers.
Apple silicon · macOS 11 or later · disk image
Not released yetSigned and notarized by Apple. Open the disk image and drag Leaf to Applications.
Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit · installer
Not released yetEarly preview, not yet tested on Windows. The installer isn't signed yet, so Windows may warn about it the first time: choose More info ▸ Run anyway.
Downloads appear here when a release is out.
Once installed, Leaf keeps itself up to date: new versions download in the background and go in when you quit. Leaf 0.1.0 doesn't update itself, so install 0.2.0 or later from here once.
Leaf