PdfCraft for Android

An Android native open-source PDF reader and editor written in Rust, built on the same engine as the desktop app, PdfCraft, with a Kotlin/Jetpack Compose UI.
Many credits to the original maintainers, storytold.

_{Each release has two APKs: the plain one for most phones, the -armeabi-v7a one for 32-bit ARM phones.}

Reading · Navigate · Comments · Forms & Fill & Sign · Edit PDF · Read aloud · Tools · Home · Light theme · Architecture · Planned features · Building

The PdfCraft Showcase open on its cover: a deep blue and orange gradient with the title Showcase and 'A tour of the page, glyph by glyph.', the page pill at 1, the top bar with back, the Read aloud switch, Find, Share and More, and the quick toolbar: Edit PDF, Comment, Highlight, Draw, Fill & Sign, Export PDF and More tools
_{The PdfCraft Showcase, a 13-page specimen PDF, open on its cover.}

Reading

The Scripts of the World page with the bars hidden: Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari, Thai, Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese, Korean, IPA, Armenian, Georgian and Tamil samples, vertical Japanese in the margin, mixed-direction text and colour emoji, with the Mathematics page below
_{Twelve writing systems, vertical Japanese and colour emoji, with the bars hidden by a tap.}


_{Reading Mode: text reflowed to the screen}	_{Night Mode, from View settings}

Navigate long documents


_{Pages: every page at a glance}	_{The outline, and bookmarks of your own}

Comments


_{A comment's thread, ‹ 3 of 17 › and Reply}	_{The Comment List, by page}

Forms & Fill & Sign


_{Every fillable field tinted blue}	_{Fill & Sign: a signature placed with a tap}

Edit PDF

Edit PDF on the Review and Markup page: a paragraph selected in a blue box with round handles, a menu with Edit text, Select all and Delete above it, and the formatting bar below: bold, italic, underline, size, font, colour and alignment
_{Edit PDF: tap a paragraph to edit its text, change its style, move it or rewrap it.}

Read aloud


_{Read aloud, the words marked as they're read}	_{The full player: time left, Voice and speed}

Tools


_{More tools, and Customize toolbar}	_{Compress PDF, one of the tools that make a new file}

Home


_{Home: the tools, Recent, Starred and On device}	_{The Tools tab: every tool, by what it does}

Light theme


_{The viewer in the light theme}	_{Home in the light theme}

Architecture

_{How the app and the engine fit together. Generated with GitDiagram.}

Planned features

PdfCraft for Android is in beta.

Area	Status
Open PDFs from files, other apps and Recent; Starred, On device, Files and Search	✅
Reading: continuous and single page, Reading Mode, Night Mode, find, text selection, links, bookmarks and contents, attachments	✅
Read aloud with the phone's voice, the words marked as they're read, and a full player	✅
Comments: notes, voice comments, highlight, underline, strikethrough, drawing (snap to shape), text; the Comment List and threads	✅
Forms, and Fill & Sign: text, marks and a drawn or imported signature; form JavaScript (calculations, field checks, buttons)	✅
Digital signatures: sign with a digital ID (a .p12 / .pfx file, or one made in the app), check a document's signatures, trust signers	✅
Edit PDF: edit text, add text and images, move, resize and turn pictures	✅ · cropping a picture ⬜
Organize and crop pages	✅
Compress, combine, set password, create PDF (images, text, office documents), scan	✅
Export to Word, RTF, Excel, PowerPoint, JPEG and PNG	✅ · Word 97 ⬜
Recognize text	✅ (the Latin alphabet without accents)
A customizable quick toolbar, upright and sideways layouts, light and dark themes	✅
Extra Features in Preferences, off until you turn them on: the status bar in documents	✅
Translations: all of the app's text is ready to translate (how)	✅ · Spanish ✅ · other languages ⬜
AI assistant, cloud storage, sharing for review	🚫 PdfCraft is a local app

_{✅ works today · 🚧 in progress · ⬜ not started · 🚫 not planned}

Building Instructions

One Gradle command builds the whole app: it compiles the Rust engine with cargo-ndk and generates the Kotlin bindings.

Clone this repository
Make sure you have at least 3 GB of free disk space
Recognize text's models (12 MB, CC-BY-SA-4.0) are in assets/models/; apps/pdfcraft-android/fetch-models.sh downloads them again if you need to
enter apps/pdfcraft-android/android and run ./gradlew assembleRelease, or open that folder in Android Studio and press Run.

Build time dependencies:

required tools

    rustup (it installs the Rust release and Android targets rust-toolchain.toml names)
    cargo install cargo-ndk --version 4.1.2 --locked
    Android SDK (API 37) and NDK 29.0.14206865
    JDK 17 or newer

Builds are only tested on Windows 11.

Translating

All of PdfCraft's text is in one file: apps/pdfcraft-android/android/app/src/main/res/values/strings.xml. To add a language:

copy it to a values-<language> folder beside it: values-es/strings.xml for Spanish, values-pt-rBR/strings.xml for Brazilian Portuguese
translate the text between the tags; keep each name, the placeholders (%1$s, %2$d, which you may move) and escapes such as \'
leave out anything you haven't translated yet: it shows in English
open a pull request

The store listing is in fastlane/metadata/android/en-US/; a copy in a folder for your language (es-ES, pt-BR) translates it too. On Android 13 and newer, PdfCraft's language can be set on its own under Settings ▸ Apps ▸ PdfCraft ▸ Language. A few messages from the PDF engine, such as some errors and the names in Undo, are English for now.

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0, at your option. PdfCraft for Android is not affiliated with Adobe; Acrobat is a trademark of Adobe Inc.

Misc info for myself

Try to use semantic commit messages. Use feat: / fix: / chore: / docs: / etc.