PDFRead

macOS

Read PDFs in any language, sentence by sentence, side by side.

PDFRead is a native macOS reader that lays the original and a translation next to each other, aligned at the sentence level. Translations cache locally as JSON, so the next time you open the same document everything is instant and offline.

Install with Homebrew.

Features

Sentence-level alignment

Read source and translation side by side, lined up sentence by sentence.

Crystal-clear rendering

Native PDF rendering with smooth zoom and crisp text at any scale.

Interactive highlights

Click a highlight in the translation pane to jump to the original sentence.

Local caching

Translations cache as JSON next to your PDFs — open them offline forever.

Bilingual layout

Two-column reading mode that respects margins, footnotes, and figures.

macOS native

A small Swift app. Opens instantly, idles at near-zero memory.