PDFreflow: Technical E-Reader

Reading a two-column paper on a phone is miserable: pinch, zoom, drag, scroll, repeat. And a PDF page is white paper, always - no real night mode, because the page is a fixed image, not text. PDFreflow ends that.

PDFreflow is an e-reader with its own PDF layout engine. It takes complex, multi-column PDFs - LaTeX papers, RFCs, technical books, heavy manuals - and reflows them into a single readable column, like an EPUB.

WHY IT'S DIFFERENT

🧠 A real layout engine

Columns detected, reading order reconstructed, headers, footers and page numbers stripped - built against a benchmark corpus of hundreds of real documents

📐 Formulas, tables and figures preserved as images

Never mangled into text

🌙 Real dark mode

Reflowed text is text, not a picture of a white page

📚 Built for heavy documents

Chunked processing keeps 1,000+ page manuals scrolling smoothly

👁️ Accessible by design

Fonts made for dyslexia and low vision (OpenDyslexic, Atkinson Hyperlegible), adjustable text size and granular line spacing

📂 More than PDF

Reads EPUB, TXT and single-file HTML

🔒 Private by design

Your documents never leave your phone. No accounts, no cloud, no ads.

WHAT TO EXPECT (OPEN BETA)

PDFreflow is free while in beta, and reflow quality is the whole point. Current limits, stated upfront:

• Text-based PDFs only - scanned or photographed documents are not supported

• No text selection, search or bookmarks yet

• Very complex layouts can still trip it

Found a page that reflows badly? That is exactly what the beta is for - every report goes straight into the fix queue.

Short PDFs (most papers) will stay free after launch; long documents will need a single unlock: one purchase covers all documents, any length, forever. No subscription.

Built by a solo developer for everyone who reads serious documents on a phone. Long-press any block in the reader to send feedback - I read every single report and will reply via the app.

Screenshots include covers of OpenStax Astronomy 2e and Biology 2e, © Rice University, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Screenshots show real, unedited output from the app's own layout engine. Logo, captions and promotional graphics are AI-assisted.