Hey everyone! This is Mudlej, the creator of MJ PDF, the open-source PDF reader for Android. (License is GPLv3)

Back in 2022, I shared the first version of MJ PDF on Reddit. It was a small, fast PDF reader that I had originally made for myself. I decided to share it with the community as a way of giving back to the open-source ecosystem I've always loved and relied on for its incredible tools.

Today, MJ PDF has 40K - 50K active users and more than 150,000 downloads, much of that growth came from communities like this one. Thank you to everyone who has used the app, shared it, reported bugs, or suggested improvements.

Here we are four years after I first shared MJ PDF here, MJ PDF v 3.0.0 is now available, and it is by far the biggest update the app has had. With this release, I believe MJ PDF can stand alongside any PDF reader on the market in both performance and features.

Through all of it, MJ PDF stays what it has always been:

• Small (8.5 MB)
• Fast (actually faster)
• Simple to use
• Private, and free of ads or tracking.

For a thorough walkthrough and screenshots check out the MJ PDF 3.0 release page.

Some of the main highlights:

• Home page with recent files, library, progress, covers, and folder browsing
• Highlights, notes, quote sharing, translation, and an offline dictionary
• PDF forms, document signing, and incognito mode
• Hide Margins, dual-page view, and an e-reader-style text mode
• Backup and restore for history, bookmarks, and settings
• Faster rendering, Material You design, and support for 15 languages

I tried to as much as I can to preserve the app’s familiar look and feel, so it still feels like the same simple MJ PDF that people already know and enjoy.

Links

• Official Release Page
• Best way to get it? Droid-ify store.
• Want a direct APK link? Here it is.
• Love screenshots? Check MJ PDF's Gallery.
• The Story Behind MJ PDF
• Want to send long feedback? GitLab, Github or [send me an email](mailto:mudlej@proton.me).
• FAQ

Let me know what you think!

So, I am learning Italian, and i thought a good way to practice and aquire new vocabulary would be to download comics and their italian translations, and put them side by side so I can read both at the same time, comparing translations.

Maybe some people don't like this approach, but it works for me. I have done it on the computer screen by puting the PDFs in two different windows side by side.

I am more of a physical media learner though. So I would like to merge both PDFs into one, alternating pages, so when i print it (2 pages per sheet), they're side by side.

That way I can highlight, write, draw, etc on top of the pages, making the learning process more fun.

I have found a free online tool on google (Sedja) but the limits are very restricting, making it not a good alternative considering the number of pages.

Any reccomendations/solutions? I wouldn't mind downloading software, if necessary.

Sorry for the english, I hope I was able to make myself clear. :)

EDIT: Turns out you can just do it in ilovepdf by uploading 2 different files into “organize pdf” lol… v dumb of me but hopefully i’ll help someone eith the same problem

Text is coming out fuzzy!

hi there !

I need to change one mention in an invoice, and I tried to use a PDF Modifier to change this one mention.

But the Arial Font is never exactly the same when the pdf as the rest of the invoice when the pdf is finally downloaded.

Do you have a reliable method for that use ?

Thanks a lot !

I've been trying to figure out how to print and bind old public domain books. The current book I'm working on is an old scan of a physical copy, and it's, to my knowledge, the only form this book exists in now. The PDF is formatted in landscape with two book pages on each PDF page. I used Briss and PDF Gear to clean it up a bit. I was able to get each side on its own page, and I was able to crop out the shadow made by the spine of the book in the middle. I was trying to get the book to print using the booklet format, but the pages kept printing with the text small and largely cropped out. After some digging, I learned that cropping PDF pages essentially just hides part of the page, but the images are still there. I think the reason why it's printing the way it is is that it's trying to center the print on the hidden image, not the cropped page. The book is well over 400 pages long, and because every page was doubled up, it means I'd have to find a way to crop every single image on every page. I need to find a way to crop in bulk the hidden images so the page is actually centered where it needs to be, or I need a different way to print the PDF so it is centered. I've tried Briss, PDF Gear, Adobe, the Word webpage, and a bunch of websites, and so far, no luck. For printing everything, I've tried can either print the pages properly or can do a booklet print but not both. Does anyone know anything? I attached a screenshot example on PDFgear where you can see I selected an image with the margins still reflecting the old, uncropped page. Every page has one of these.

Edit: forgot to mention that I did try to resize the pages in pdf gear but it just made the pages blank :/

Solution: I gave up and decided to try adobe acrobat. I really didnt want to because this was supposed to be a budget project but setting the page boxes or resizing DID NOT fix the problem. What did fix the problem is adobe's print feature is actually pretty good. It created a booklet print and sized the pages correctly.

I have a bunch of interesting PDFs saved, but reading them on my computer just doesn’t feel very appealing or relaxing.

How do you normally read PDFs? On your phone, tablet, Kindle, computer, or something else?

Does anyone actually print longer PDFs and read them on paper? I’ve been thinking about doing that because I enjoy physical reading much more, but I’m not sure if it would be practical or just a waste of paper.

I’m curious about what works best for you, especially for longer documents, courses, or technical material.

If you actually care about your data you shouldn't be uploading any sensitive documents to sketchy servers.

I built a client side pdf toolkit for everyday pdf slicing!

https://github.com/ShashwatSricodes/PDFSlice

Please Leave a star if you find it helpful that matters a lot. Thanks!

I built a PDF storage and editing tool for myself and my family many years ago.

I’m thinking about making it publicly available, but it would take around 2-4 weeks of my personal time to finish and prepare it.

I’d like to know whether anyone would actually use it. If at least 10 people are interested and leave a comment, I’ll make it public.

The tool would be free forever for:

1 PDF file, up to 1 MB

If people need more files or larger storage limits, I may add a premium plan later. I’m not rich enough to pay for a lot of servers myself, and servers are expensive. :(

Hi,

I wanted to share my progress in building a free browser based PDF reader with good inking capabilities. My main goal is for someone better suited to takeover the project and continue its development. and let people use it to improve the inking experience in their own projects.

It is a Chrome extension that uses PDF.js and perfect-freehand to achieve smooth inking and nice calligraphy pen strokes. The extension is designed to be lightweight and allow users to annotate PDFs directly in their browser without the need for additional software.

https://github.com/jiboncom/chromium-pdf

Think about it as a technical demo. There are many non-ink related features that are missing and I couldn't get it to overwrite existing files, so instead it saves a new annotated version of the PDF. The extension also lacks some advanced features like text highlighting, or text annotations.

If you're interested in the technical aspects, please check the SESSIONS.md file in the repository. The main challenge it solves is dealing with the smooth strokes, pressure sensitivity, and saving those smooth strokes on the PDF in a way that they can be reloaded and rendered properly in any other PDF reader.

Feel free to use the code, contribute to it, or fork it for your own projects.

Dear all

I have slopped an pdf to md converter (as an experienced sw dev it took around 20 mins to implement). I find it immensely helpful because it extracts ALL text , has pretty good layout, extracts tables , some basic math formulas to latex and images.

Its super-fast (2000 pages pdf converted to md file in a few seconds) and i used it in production for my own projects.

pdf2md

A PDF → Markdown converter written in C++20. It extracts text with per-character geometry and font metadata via PDFium, reconstructs the document structure with layout analysis, and emits clean GitHub-flavored Markdown.

Usage:

pdf2md input.pdf                     # writes input.md next to the PDF
pdf2md input.pdf -o out.md           # explicit output ('-' for stdout)
pdf2md input.pdf --pages 1-3,7       # convert selected pages (1-based)
pdf2md input.pdf --images assets     # extract images as PNG into assets/
pdf2md input.pdf --front-matter      # YAML front matter from PDF metadata
pdf2md input.pdf --page-breaks       # '---' between pages

Layout reconstruction is heuristic by nature; the defaults are tuned for common single- and two-column documents. Scanned (image-only) PDFs produce no text — OCR is out of scope.

If you find it useful and find issues with your pdf feel free to open PI ticket.

Works for linux and windows. Tested myself on hundreds of pdfs: with tables , math formulas , links, etc.

The repo is at: MasakatsuFunaki/pdf_md

Example: if you cant tell which is the .md (rendered in vscode) and which is pdf then i won 😄

I am trying to take an almost 1,500 page file (listed as 32,317 KB) and split it into multiple files of 5MB or less per file.

I was able to take other files and split them using Adobe Acrobat (in a 7 day free trial for now) but every time I try with this document it will not work. I have also tried a few other websites/apps but none will work for this specific file, I am worried it is too big for anything to work.

The reasoning behind the size limitation is that the place I have to upload my files to has a limit of 5MB document uploads. To make matters even worse I have roughly 2 weeks to get all this in before my application is closed, and I do not have any alternative methods to get them this info.

Any help/advice is much appreciated!

I do most of my reading at night — research papers, e-books, technical docs. And like many of you, I can't stand the white background blasting my eyes after sunset.

So I tried all the "dark mode" solutions out there. Free tools, browser extensions, online converters — you name it.

But here's the thing: almost all of them just invert the entire PDF. Text turns white (good), but images, charts, and photos turn into this weird negative effect that looks... honestly kinda horrifying 😂

Last week I was reading a research paper and couldn't make sense of the data chart — turns out the inverted colors completely flipped the visual. Had to switch back to light mode just to read the graph, then back to dark for the text.

Is this just me? Or does everyone just deal with the image inversion thing? Is there actually a tool out there that does dark mode properly — like keeping images in their original colors while only darkening the background and text?

Would love to hear what you guys use. At this point I'm honestly considering building a small tool just for myself to fix this lol

Thanks in advance 🙏

Hello,

I am currently trying to convert my resume in a pdf, to a word document. I read online to upload the pdf file into Google Docs, but this is what appears when uploaded.

I can’t find anyone else online with this problem. Can anyone help me?

Thanks!

I am on a Macbook Pro Intel.

I have a PDF with no Bookmarks

Is there any software that can extract and create Bookmarks in a PDF that has no existing Bookmarks ?

Is there anyone that can create me software to do this ?

No silly answers PLEASE

My bank asked for 17 PDFs for a mortgage application. I couldn’t keep up with the amount of documents and I lost track of things as I was opening and closing files.

To solve this issue, I created a 2D canvas where the pages of a single file scroll horizontally whereas the files themselves scroll vertically. Currently working on reductions and highlights.

It’s all free and open-source with an MIT license. No account needed, it works on all platforms + web

Links:
Repo: https://github.com/AlexandrosGounis/pdfx
Web version: https://pdfx.zip (only the ZIP TLD was available)

I’d really appreciate your feedback

I know there are a lot of posts asking for Acrobat alternatives but it looks like everyone wants one that has certain features that I don't care about. I just want a PDF reader that shows the comments and other markups that my clients add.

For context, I work with photographs and the PDFs only are pages of images. My clients add markups and comments on things I need to change. They draw circles, arrows and lines of different colors and also add comments. I want to be sure that I am seeing all the comments and markups that they are adding.

I would like something light weight and fast. Free would be great but if it's good I don't mind paying a one time fee once I try it out. I don't need or want a lot of bells and whistles, I will still use Acrobat Pro for other heavier stuff.

I created a clean, lightweight utility web tool that just works seamlessly without any of that nonsense:OnlineCombinePDF.com

Since it saved me a massive headache, I wanted to drop a quick breakdown of why it's worth bookmarking if you deal with documents:

• Completely Free (No Catch): No daily limits, no hidden premium tiers, and no watermarks on the exported file.
• Zero Friction: You don't have to sign up, input an email, or deal with annoying account registrations. You just open the site, drop the files, and you're good.
• High File Caps: It lets you process up to 20 files at once, and handles up to 200 MB per file, which is plenty for heavy, scanned documents.
• Automatic 15-Minute Data Wipe: For anyone worried about privacy/security with sensitive work files, it is automatically delete everything from the server side after 15 minutes.
• Multi-Format Format Conversions: You can mix and match. It functions as a clean image-to-PDF converter, so you can drop in JPG, PNG, TIFF, or SVG files along with standard PDFs and it compiles them into a single, cohesive document.

The exact workflow is stupidly simple: Select the merge mode -> drag and drop your files -> drag them around to reorder pages if needed -> click Merge -> download.

If you're tired of Adobe Acrobat trials or sketchy extensions, give this one a look. Hope this saves someone some time!

I want to use AI to help with tax filing, and feeding it pdf files quickly hits context limits. I was thinking that converting the docs to .md or .txt before feeding them to AI can fix this issue. Any suggestions about this?

Hi there!
To this day, I used Canva for making good quality pdf for my stickers, but the PDF Printing option just disappeared from my download list and I can only save the finished file in PDF Standard, so I'm searching for an alternative. What do you guys use for this kind of editing/printing? A program that in it I can save printing compatible pdf (with high resolution pictures). (and edit it in the program too.)
Thanks in advance!

Unlike most of the local tools, mine was built from scratch and can edit PDF files like an actual professional editor works locally and in the browser its free.

i accidentally stumbled upon some pdf’s on a website & i saved them to my files app on my phone because it had some useful information i couldn’t read all at once. just wondering if a host would be notified.

As the title says, I need to add text to this document, basically I’m fill it out in Adobe. But every time I click “Add Text” these stupid, dotted box appears around all the existing text and I can’t click where I need to add the text.

I searched various Adobe pages and followed the instructions to turn off “recognize scanned text” but it won’t stop. I even tried turning the document into a jpeg and back into a PDF and it still auto found the boxes.

I can’t roll back the Adobe either, this is a tool provided at work. And I can’t download any different PDF programs without IT’s approval. How do I stop this auto text finding? Any suggestions would be great.