A quick check of just one of my working volumes revealed that it contains over 20,000 PDFs, the earliest dating from 1994, just a year after its introduction. Six years ago, I had become fed up with trying to use other PDF readers and set out to write my own, that soon became Podofyllin. It has some unique features, of which the most important to me is that it can’t and won’t change a PDF. Podofyllin is the latest app I have rebuilt, tweaked and given a new icon to, primarily for compatibility with macOS 26 Tahoe.
What I hadn’t realised was that, at some time during Sequoia, one of Podofyllin’s key features had quietly stopped working, apparently as a result of a silent change in macOS. This update fixes that, and restores (almost) full functionality, with just one feature still absent.
Perhaps its most important feature after preserving original PDFs unchanged, is its support for opening multiple views of the same document. Shown above are three different windows, each showing the same document, and at the lower left Writing Tools is just about to produce a summary from one of them.
The main window has thumbnails on the left, a conventional rendered page view in the middle, and the whole text content to the right. You can also open an unlimited number of accessory windows, each displaying different pages from the same document.
Another unique feature (the recently troublesome one) is a window to display the contents of the PDF file in raw format, so you can inspect its structure, metadata, and more.
This source code window shows two versions of the code, one as written in the file, the other ‘flattened’ as used in Quartz 2D to render it, together with a summary. Quite a few PDFs contain hidden content, usually left over from an earlier edit. Some save contents in versions, and for those Podofyllin can recreate and save those as separate PDF documents.
The one feature that used to work in the past that I still can’t revive is exporting page contents in Rich Text format, something I suspect isn’t working in macOS.
I have also taken the opportunity to overhaul the Help file thoroughly, to make it more accessible and navigable.
Podofyllin 1.4 is now available from here: podofyllin14
from its Product Page, and via its auto-update mechanism.
Like other recent updates, this new version requires Big Sur or later. If you’re still running Catalina or earlier, please check Podofyllin’s Help document, as that explains how you can disable its auto-update mechanism.
I’m delighted to welcome the prodigal Podofyllin back at last.