Methodox Reader v0.3

Methodox Reader v0.3

A fast reader for PDFs and EPUBs.

Read, search, annotate and print PDF documents, and read EPUB books, on Windows, Linux and macOS. Highlight passages, leave notes, draw on a page, fill in forms, reorder and rotate pages, merge documents, and export pages as images.

A 28-page paper opens in ten milliseconds and draws a page in about twenty-five.

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The reading view: a paper open at page one, a page thumbnail rail on the left with page 1 selected, an empty comments panel on the right, and a status bar reading page 1 of 28 at fit width, 150%.
The reading view. Thumbnails and outline on the left, comments on the right, the page in the middle.

Speed

It opens before you have let go of the mouse.

Documents open in milliseconds, not seconds. There is no splash screen, because there is nothing to wait for.

  • Opens instantly

    A 28-page paper is open in 10 ms; a 1.1 MB scanned document in 1 ms. Nothing is parsed that you have not looked at yet.

  • Draws a page in a blink

    About 25 ms for a page of text at 150%. Rendering happens off the interface thread, so scrolling stays smooth while it does.

  • Never blanks, never re-reads

    Pages you have seen are kept, so turning back is instant, and the pages just off screen are drawn before you reach them. Jump to page 400 and it is fetched first, not queued behind the pages you scrolled past.

What it does

A reader first, an editor when you need one.

Everything below is in v0.2 today. Nothing is behind a paywall or a plugin.

  • Read

    Continuous scroll through a whole document, at fit width, fit page or free zoom. Pages render in the background, so scrolling never blanks.

  • Navigate

    A page thumbnail rail, the document's outline, and a comments panel, alongside the page itself.

  • Search

    Search the entire document. Every hit is listed with its surrounding text and marked in place on the page.

  • Annotate

    Highlight a text selection, leave sticky notes, draw freehand, and draw boxes — then move, resize, recolour or retype any of them afterwards.

  • Annotations that travel

    These are standard PDF annotations. They survive a save and show up in other PDF readers.

  • Organise pages

    See every page at once. Select, rotate, delete, or extract a selection to a new PDF.

  • Fill in forms

    Form fields are shown on the page. Type into them, pick from lists, tick boxes, and save the filled document.

  • Export

    Export pages as images — PNG, JPEG and others — at whatever resolution you need.

  • Print

    Page ranges, copies, paper size, scaling, several pages per sheet, and print to file.

  • Scanned documents too

    Fax-coded scans — the kind most scanners and archives produce — open and read like anything else.

  • Merge, and light or dark

    Combine several PDFs in an order you choose. Both themes ship; the document stays the brightest thing on screen.

  • Read EPUB books

    Books open alongside PDFs, with their own contents, search and printing. Choose the page and text size a book is laid out at.

A closer look

Marking up, searching, and rearranging.

Screenshots from v0.3, on a 28-page paper and our own 120-page textbook.

Annotating: the highlight tool is active with a row of five highlight colours, a paragraph of the abstract is highlighted yellow, a green sticky note sits in the margin, and two comments are listed in the panel on the right.
Highlight a selection, drop a note, draw on the page. The comments panel lists what you left and where.
The page organiser: all 28 pages of the document laid out as a grid of numbered thumbnails, with a toolbar offering rotate left, rotate right, extract, delete and select all.
The whole document at once. Select, rotate, delete, or extract a selection to a new PDF.
The merge dialog: a reorderable list of documents in output order, each row showing its page count and file size, with move up, move down and remove controls and a running total of the result.
Documents in output order, with the page count of the result as you go.
The export dialog: fields for a page range, image format set to PNG, resolution set to 150 DPI, an option to render annotations onto the images, and a destination folder and file name, with a preview line reading page-001.png, 1240 by 1755 pixels, 28 files.
Pick a range, a format and a resolution. It tells you the pixel size before you commit.
An EPUB book open in Methodox Reader: the contents of Introductory Visual Programming with Divooka down the left, a page number beside every chapter and section, and a page of the book set in serif type beside it.
Books read like anything else, with their own contents and page numbers — down to the section. The page size and the text size are yours to choose.

Themes

Light and dark, same layout.

The chrome goes quiet so the document does not have to. Nothing moves, nothing reflows.

The reading view on the light theme: pale grey chrome and sidebars around a white page, with page 1 selected in the thumbnail rail.
Reading, light theme.
The same reading view on the dark theme: dark grey chrome and sidebars around the same white page, laid out identically.
The same view, dark theme.

Availability

How to get it

v0.3 adds EPUB books, editable annotations and form filling.

Download it from itch.io.

Methodox Reader runs on Windows, Linux and macOS. Builds are published on itch.io, which is also where updates appear.

Download on itch.io More from Methodox