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Ars Technica's subscription-only ArsPro tier continues to offer formatted PDF versions of articles and full-text RSS feeds, options that date back to the site's 1998 launch. The company notes these features let subscribers read content offline or in RSS readers rather than only through a web browser.
Apple has shared a preview of the iPhone Duo's enhanced PDF viewing capabilities, featuring a new two-page layout in its Quick Look feature. This update aims to improve the experience of reading PDFs on a smartphone, a task traditionally better suited to tablets like the iPad. The device is expected to launch in October, with additional features such as Apple Pencil support anticipated later this year.
RevPDF has been introduced as a free software that enables users to edit, organize, and convert PDFs directly on their devices without needing an internet connection. It offers tools for text editing, form handling, redaction, OCR, and document comparison, along with automation workflows for repetitive tasks.
A new PDF parsing tool called papero converts PDFs into Markdown, JSON, Word or Excel while preserving reading order, tables, formulas, figures and the bounding-box position of every block. It runs entirely on CPU using geometric analysis rather than machine learning models, and is available as a browser app, a Python package (pip install papero-extract), or an API. The browser version processes files locally so the PDF does not leave the user's machine.
Writer Gwern observes that while fraudulent videos, photos, and Word documents are common online scams, editing existing PDFs to forge fake claims is essentially unheard of. He notes that searching for and downloading a paper's PDF almost always yields exactly what was originally published, aside from minor draft-versus-final discrepancies.
Readdle has updated PDF Expert to take advantage of new iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 capabilities, most notably a Handwriting Recognition feature that indexes handwritten notes as searchable text across a user's entire document library. The update, built on Apple's PKStrokeRecognizer API, supports 29 languages and also adds Apple Pencil Pro squeeze-gesture support for opening the app's tool palette, along with an expanded Liquid Glass visual redesign.
Mozilla's Firefox 156 release improves large JPEG handling by using libjpeg-turbo's IDCT scaling during decoding instead of loading full-size images first, cutting memory use up to 20 times and doubling decode speed. The update also makes the built-in PDF.js viewer start up to 45% faster by loading its background worker earlier, and expands sponsored address bar suggestions to France, Germany and Italy. Firefox 157, due in about two weeks, is expected to add support for the JPEG XL image format.
A Wonder Tools newsletter roundup highlights software for private AI chats, offline audio transcription, and secure PDF redaction that all run without sending user data to external servers. The focus is on tools designed so sensitive information stays on the user's own device rather than being uploaded for processing.
A new open-source project called Bookshelf offers a self-hosted ebook library that renders a single searchable page for EPUB and PDF files, with in-browser readers for each format. It can run as a Cloudflare Worker backed by R2 object storage or as a Node server reading from a local directory, and ships a Docker setup that bundles the cwebp and pdftoppm tools needed for proper cover generation.
Microsoft has confirmed that the August 2026 .NET Framework cumulative update causes some WPF-based applications to throw a System.IO.FileFormatException when printing or exporting to PDF/XPS with fonts like Calibri. The bug affects current Windows 10 and 11 releases as well as Windows Server versions from 2012 through 2025, and Microsoft is still working on a permanent fix.
OCR It is a Chrome extension that lets users draw a fixed capture region over a paginated document viewer—like a scanned book or locked PDF—and repeatedly screenshot and OCR that same spot with a hotkey, building a full text transcript as pages turn. An auto-run mode can capture, advance the page, and repeat until the document ends, all processed locally using a bundled Tesseract engine with no network calls or API keys required.