TinyPDF

A native macOS PDF text extractor. See pages and extracted text side by side. Runs OCR on scans automatically. Export to Markdown.

Features

• Side-by-side layout — extracted text alongside the rendered PDF pages
• Text extraction — automatic page-by-page text with # Page N headers
• Built-in OCR — scanned and image-based PDFs via Apple's Vision framework
• Export as Markdown — save extracted text as .md with Cmd+S
• Continuous scroll — PDF preview with auto-zoom
• Directory browsing — navigate folders, subdirectories, and files
• Quick open — fuzzy file finder (Cmd+P)
• Line numbers — optional gutter with current line highlight
• Word wrap — toggle with Opt+Z
• Font size control — Cmd+/Cmd- to adjust, Cmd+0 to reset
• Multiple windows — each window has independent state
• Light & dark mode — follows system appearance
• On-device AI — Cmd+K to ask questions about your document (CoreML, fully offline)
• Open from Finder — double-click .pdf files to open in TinyPDF

Requirements

• macOS 26.0+
• Xcode 26+ (to build)

Build

xcodegen generate --spec project.yml

xcodebuild clean build \
  -project TinyPDF.xcodeproj \
  -scheme TinyPDF \
  -configuration Release \
  -derivedDataPath /tmp/tinybuild/tinypdf \
  CODE_SIGN_IDENTITY="-"

rm -rf /Applications/TinyPDF.app
cp -R /tmp/tinybuild/tinypdf/Build/Products/Release/TinyPDF.app /Applications/
xattr -cr /Applications/TinyPDF.app

Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Cmd+O	Open file
Cmd+Shift+O	Open folder
Cmd+S	Export as Markdown
Cmd+P	Quick open
Cmd+K	AI assistant
Cmd+Shift+N	New window
Cmd+= / Cmd+-	Font size
Cmd+0	Reset font size
Opt+Z	Toggle word wrap
Opt+P	Toggle PDF preview
Opt+L	Toggle line numbers

Tech

Built with SwiftUI, NSTextView, PDFKit, Vision (OCR), and TinyKit.

Part of TinySuite

Native macOS micro-tools that each do one thing well.

App	What it does
TinyMark	Markdown editor with live preview
TinyTask	Plain-text task manager
TinyJSON	JSON viewer with collapsible tree
TinyCSV	Lightweight CSV/TSV table viewer
TinyPDF	PDF text extractor with OCR
TinyLog	Log viewer with level filtering
TinySQL	Native PostgreSQL browser

License

MIT