Advanced PDF Reader

A professional, feature-rich PDF reader built with Electron and TypeScript, designed for seamless PDF viewing, annotation, form filling, and document management.

Features

Core Viewing

• High-quality PDF rendering powered by PDF.js
• Smooth scrolling with lazy page loading (renders only visible pages)
• Zoom in/out with keyboard shortcuts and GUI controls
• Page rotation, fullscreen mode, and continuous/single page view
• Bookmarks and thumbnail sidebar

Annotation Tools

• Highlight, Underline, Strikeout text
• Free Draw with adjustable color palette
• Sticky Notes for comments
• Eraser tool
• Annotations are saved into the PDF via pdf-lib

Form Filling

• Auto-detects PDF form fields (text, checkbox, dropdown)
• Inline interactive inputs positioned directly on the page
• Two-way sync between inline fields and sidebar panel
• Form data is embedded when saving/printing

File Operations

• Save — overwrite current PDF with annotations & form data
• Save As — export current page as PDF, PNG, or JPEG
• Print — merges annotations, opens in system PDF viewer for printing

Themes

• Dark, Light, Midnight, Rose, Forest, Sunset color themes
• Persistent theme selection via localStorage

Auto Update

• Automatic update checks via GitHub Releases using electron-updater
• Prompts user to restart when a new version is downloaded

Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
Ctrl+O	Open PDF
Ctrl+S	Save
Ctrl+Shift+S	Save As
Ctrl+P	Print
Ctrl+=	Zoom In
Ctrl+-	Zoom Out
Ctrl+0	Reset Zoom
Ctrl+F	Find/Search
Ctrl+B	Toggle Sidebar
F11	Fullscreen

Installation

git clone https://github.com/needyamin/pdf-reader.git
cd pdf-reader
npm install

Development

npm run dev

Build

Build a Windows installer (single .exe):

npm run dist

Output will be in the out/ directory.

Tech Stack

• Electron — Desktop application framework
• TypeScript — Main & preload processes
• PDF.js (pdfjs-dist) — PDF rendering
• pdf-lib — PDF modification, form filling, annotation embedding
• electron-updater — Auto-update from GitHub Releases
• electron-builder — Packaging & distribution

Project Structure

PDF_READER/
├── src/
│   ├── main.ts          # Electron main process
│   └── preload.ts       # Context bridge API
├── renderer/
│   ├── index.html       # Application UI
│   ├── renderer.js      # Renderer logic
│   └── styles.css       # Themes & styling
├── assets/              # Icons & resources
├── package.json
└── tsconfig.json

Auto-Update Setup

1. Bump version in package.json
2. Run npm run dist
3. Create a GitHub Release with the matching tag (e.g. v1.1.0)
4. Upload the .exe installer and latest.yml from out/
5. Existing users will be prompted to update automatically

Author

YAMiN HOSSAIN — @needyamin

License

MIT