The complete RyDF guide

What RyDF is

RyDF is a native Mac app for reading, marking up and printing PDFs — built for the big technical ones. Plans, submittals, CAD sheet sets and thousand-page specs are the design target, not casual reading. It does four jobs in one window: view, mark up, measure to scale, and print.

The thing that makes it different is that it stays fluid on files that bog other viewers down. Pages are rendered in tiles, only what you can see is drawn, and the rest of the document is quietly prepared in the background while you work.

What you need

A Mac running macOS 11 Big Sur or later. The published alpha builds are for Apple Silicon Macs (M1 or newer).

There's no Windows or Linux version. Parts of the app lean on Apple-only frameworks — the on-device text recognition in particular — so macOS is the only supported platform today.

Installing it

1. Open the .dmg you downloaded from the Downloads page.
2. Drag RyDF into your Applications folder.
3. Launch it. Builds are signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so RyDF opens like any other app — no Gatekeeper warning to click through.

Nothing else needs installing. The PDF rendering engine and the fonts used to draw markups are bundled inside the app itself.

The first launch

RyDF opens a single window with an empty tab labelled New Tab, a toolbar, and a start screen in the middle reading “View, mark up and print PDFs — even the huge ones.” with an Open PDF… button and the reminder that you can “drop a PDF anywhere in this window”. The status bar along the bottom reads No document open.

A second or two later, RyDF asks once how it should keep itself up to date, in a dialog headed “How should RyDF check for updates?”. The three choices are On every launch, Every n days and Manually only; the middle one is pre-selected at 7 days (any value from 1 to 365 is accepted). Press Continue to save your answer.

Out of the box RyDF follows your Mac's light or dark appearance, defaults to inches for measurements, autosaves your markups every 5 minutes, and allows itself a 4 GB page cache. It also reads your macOS account name and uses it as the author on every markup you create.

Opening a drawing

Three everyday ways in:

• Click Open PDF… on the start screen, or Open in the toolbar.
• Press ⌘O from anywhere in the app.
• Drag a PDF straight onto the window.

Where it lands depends on what's already showing. An empty tab is filled; a tab that already has a document open gets a new tab instead, so dropping a file never overwrites your place. Press ⌘T (or click + at the end of the tab strip) for a fresh empty tab.

Once the file opens you get a green confirmation like “Opened yoursheet.pdf — 52 pages”, and the status bar fills in with the file name, its size on disk and its page count.

The start screen also keeps a Recent files list of the last eight documents you opened, each showing its name and full location. It survives between launches, and every tab contributes to it.

Making RyDF your default PDF app

RyDF registers itself with macOS as a PDF app, so it appears in Finder's Open With menu once it's in your Applications folder. To use it just once, right-click a PDF and choose Open With ▸ RyDF.

1. In Finder, right-click a PDF and choose Get Info.
2. Under Open with, choose RyDF.
3. Click Change All… to apply it to every PDF.

Double-clicking a PDF while RyDF is closed launches it and opens that drawing; doing it while RyDF is already running brings the app forward and opens the file in a new tab. If that exact file is already open in a tab, RyDF just switches to it rather than opening a second copy. Double-clicking several PDFs at once works — each one is opened in turn.

What you see while a big file opens

Opening happens in two visible stages. First a card reads Opening yourfile.pdf with the line Opening… while the file itself is read. Then a second card takes over with a real progress bar and Preparing… n% while the first pages — and their sidebar thumbnails — are drawn ahead of time. That's deliberate: the first thing you scroll to is already there instead of a blank sheet.

When that clears, the rest of the document keeps rendering quietly in the background. The status bar shows Rendering pages… n/total with a small bar beside it, and it disappears when everything is ready. You can read, scroll and mark up the whole time — interactive work always takes priority over the background pass.

If a drawing lives in iCloud Drive and hasn't been downloaded to your Mac yet, the first card says Downloading from cloud storage… instead. RyDF asks macOS to fetch the file and waits up to three minutes before giving up. Dropbox and OneDrive online-only files are fetched by those services themselves, so they work too — the window just says Opening… for longer.

The window at a glance

Across the very top is the tab strip, one tab per open drawing. Below it the toolbar: on the left the sidebar toggle and the file actions (Open, Save markups, Export, OCR), in the middle the markup tools and their properties, and on the right the page number, zoom controls, Print and the Preferences gear.

Down the left is the sidebar with its four tabs — Pages, Outline, Markups and Search. The rest is the drawing.

Along the bottom, the status bar is worth knowing. On the left it names the open file, its size and page count, plus the background rendering progress while that's running. In the middle it counts the markups, shows a dot when you have unsaved changes, and — if the page you're on has a measurement scale — shows it as a button you can click to recalibrate. On the right it names the active tool and the exact zoom.

Scrolling and jumping to a page

A document is one long vertical strip: every page sits above the next with a small gap, and you move through the file by scrolling rather than clicking “next page”. Pages are centred on the widest page in the set, so a mix of big plan sheets and letter-size specs stays visually stable instead of jumping left and right.

The toolbar shows the page you're on and the total, as a box you can type into (its tooltip is Go to page (Enter)). Click it, type a page number and press Enter to jump; Esc puts it back. The number always reflects the topmost page actually visible and updates as you scroll.

The sidebar gives you three more ways to navigate: click a thumbnail in Pages, a bookmark in Outline, or an entry in Markups to jump straight there.

Zoom, Fit width and Fit page

The zoom controls sit at the top right: a minus button, an editable percentage box, and a plus button. Each click steps by 20%. To go somewhere exact, click the box, type a number and press Enter — anything outside 10%–800% is clamped to that range.

You can also pinch on a trackpad, or hold Ctrl (or ⌘) while scrolling. Gesture zooming keeps the point under your pointer fixed, so you can push into a detail without it sliding away; the buttons and shortcuts keep the centre of the window fixed instead. A plain scroll always scrolls and never zooms.

Fit width and Fit page sit just right of the zoom controls. Fit is sticky, not a one-shot: while it's on, the zoom recalculates when you resize the window or the sidebar. Any manual zoom turns it off, and clicking the lit button again turns it off too. A newly opened drawing starts in Fit width.

Panning and keyboard scrolling

Three ways to drag the page around:

• The Pan tool (H) turns left-drag into panning.
• Hold Space to temporarily turn any tool into a pan grip — release and you're straight back to drawing.
• A middle-mouse drag always pans, whatever tool is active.

With the drawing area focused, Page Down and Page Up scroll by 90% of a window height, and Home / End jump to the very top and bottom of the document. Press V to go back to the Select tool.

Several drawings at once

Each open document gets a tab, labelled with the file name minus the .pdf. A dot next to the name means that tab has unsaved markup changes — handy for spotting which of several drawings still needs saving. Hovering a tab shows its full path.

Every tab remembers its own zoom, fit mode, current page, scroll position, page selection, search results and markups with their own undo history. Leave a tab zoomed into a corner of sheet 42, come back later, and that's exactly where you land. Switching is instant, because each tab's pages stay rendered rather than being thrown away.

Shared across the whole window: the active markup tool, the sidebar state, your preferences, and the pop-up messages.

Pages

A single column of page thumbnails at each page's real aspect ratio, with the page number underneath. The page you're viewing is outlined in the accent colour, and the list scrolls itself to keep that thumbnail visible as you move through the drawing. At the bottom right of the panel's toolbar a counter reads either 312 pages or, once you select something, 7 selected.

Selecting pages

• Click — select just that page and jump the main view to it.
• ⌘-click — add or remove one page, without moving the view.
• Shift-click — select a run from the last clicked page to this one, without moving the view.

That selection is shared with the print window's Selected pages option, with the OCR dialog, and with the Organize Pages grid.

The toolbar and the right-click menu

A row of icon buttons sits above the thumbnails: Organize pages (grid view)…, rotate counter-clockwise, rotate clockwise, Extract selected pages to a new PDF…, Insert a PDF after the selected page…, Insert blank pages… and Delete selected pages. Rotate, extract and delete stay greyed out until something is selected.

Right-clicking a thumbnail offers the same operations plus Copy scale and Paste scale. Right-clicking a page that isn't selected selects just that page first; right-clicking inside an existing multi-page selection keeps the whole selection.

Reordering by dragging

Drag a thumbnail up or down and an accent-coloured line shows where it will land. On drop you get a confirmation like “Moved page 12 to position 4”.

Outline

The PDF's built-in bookmark tree — on a drawing set, usually the sheet index. Each row shows the bookmark title with its page number right-aligned; clicking jumps there. Rows with children have a triangle to expand or collapse, and Expand all / Collapse all act on the whole tree.

The entry matching the page you're viewing is highlighted and scrolled into view automatically, so the Outline doubles as a “where am I in the set” indicator. A PDF with no bookmarks simply reads No outline.

Right-clicking an entry opens the same page-operations menu as the Pages tab — rotate, extract, insert, copy/paste scale and delete — so you can act on a sheet straight from the sheet index.

Markups

Every annotation in the document, grouped by page. The header reads something like 48 markups · 12 open, where “open” counts everything not marked Done, Approved or Rejected.

Each row shows a coloured icon for the markup type, the first line of its text as a preview, and the author with a relative time (just now, 14m ago, 3h ago). Clicking a row selects that markup and scrolls the page to it.

Filter with the status pills — None, For review, Question, Done, Approved, Rejected — and the two dropdowns, All types and All authors. On a set marked up by several people, the author filter isolates one reviewer's comments. Each row also has a status pill you can click to restatus, and a delete button.

Search

Press ⌘F to open the Search tab with the cursor already in the box. Typing searches automatically after a short pause. Two toggles sit beside the field: Aa for Match case and W for Whole word, both off by default.

Search starts at the page you're on, runs to the end, then wraps to the beginning — so the nearest matches surface first — and it jumps you to the first hit as soon as one is found. It scans in batches, reporting progress like “Scanned 120/312 pages… 18 found”, so results appear before the whole document has been read.

Step through results with ↑ and ↓, re-run with Enter, and clear with Esc. Every match is highlighted on the drawing itself; the one you're on gets the accent colour and an outline. If highlights are hard to spot on dense line work, increase Search result highlight in Preferences.

The tool palette

Three buttons are always visible, because they're ways of working with the page rather than annotation tools: Select (V), Pan (H) and Select text. Everything else sits behind category tabs — Text, Draw, Measure, Stamp and Signature — showing only the icons for the tab you're on. RyDF starts on the Text tab with Select active.

You never have to hunt for the right tab: pressing a tool's letter selects it and flips the toolbar to the tab it lives on. Hovering any icon shows its name and shortcut, for example Rectangle (R).

Notes, text boxes and callouts

Note (N) drops a small sticky-note pin where you click, then switches you back to Select and opens the note's comment popup so you can type straight away. A pin is a fixed size — movable, but not resizable.

Text box (T) makes a plain box of text. Drag out the size you want or just click for a default box; the cursor lands in it immediately. Text wraps at the box width and Return gives you a new line. Click outside to commit, or press Esc to abandon the edit and keep the previous text.

Callout is a text box with a leader arrow. Place the box, type, then drag the round handle at the arrow tip to aim it. Drag the tip inside the box and the leader disappears — a neat way to turn a callout into a plain labelled box.

An empty text box or callout isn't thrown away; it stays on the page so you can come back and label it later.

Shapes, clouds, pen and highlighter

Rectangle (R), Ellipse (O), Cloud (C), Line (L) and Arrow (A) are single drag gestures. Cloud draws the familiar scalloped revision cloud around the rectangle you drag. A drag shorter than about three points is treated as a stray click and nothing is created.

Polyline (P) and Polygon cloud are click-by-click: click each corner, then press Return or double-click to finish. Esc throws away a chain in progress. Both stay active afterwards so you can draw the next one straight away.

Pen (K) is freehand and Highlighter (G) is the same gesture with a broad translucent stroke. Both stay selected after each stroke. Every other shape tool drops you back into Select as soon as the shape is finished, so the next thing you do is naturally adjusting what you just drew.

Rectangle, Ellipse, Cloud and closed polygon clouds can take a fill; lines, arrows, polylines, pen and highlighter strokes are stroke-only.

Stamps

The Stamp tab holds a split button: the icon places the current stamp (S), and the chevron beside it opens the list — APPROVED, REJECTED, FOR REVIEW, DRAFT, FINAL, CONFIDENTIAL, plus Custom… for your own wording, which is converted to capitals. The button's tooltip always tells you what will be placed, e.g. Stamp: APPROVED (S).

Click to drop a default-sized stamp or drag to size it exactly; the lettering shrinks automatically to fit. A selected stamp gets an extra round handle in the middle of its text — drag that to slide the wording around inside the box, which is useful when the box needs to cover an area but the text should sit clear of the drawing underneath.

Signatures

1. Open the Signature tab and click the chevron (or the icon, the first time) to open Create signature.
2. Choose Type and enter your name — it's rendered in a cursive hand with a live preview — or choose Import image and pick a photo or scan.
3. Imported images have Remove white background ticked by default, so a photographed signature drops onto the drawing cleanly instead of as a white block.
4. Decide whether to tick Remember on this Mac (see below), then press Use signature. Your next click or drag on the page places it.

A signature is session-only by default — deliberately, because it's a piece of you rather than a preference, and RyDF won't write one to disk without being told to. Tick Remember on this Mac and it's stored locally and reloaded on the next launch; untick it and the stored copy is erased straight away, even if you then cancel the dialog. Nothing is ever uploaded.

Highlighting real text

Select text is more than a mode. With it active, drag across text on the page — the words highlight as you go — and when you let go a small bar appears beside the selection with four buttons: Highlight, Underline, Strikeout and Copy.

The first three create real markups that follow the shape of the selected lines and appear in the Markups list like anything else. They take their colour and opacity from whatever the freehand Highlighter is currently set to. Copy puts the words on the clipboard.

This only works on pages with real text. A scanned sheet has none until you run Recognize Text on it — which is the main payoff of OCR.

The properties bar

The properties bar does double duty: with something selected it restyles the selection, and with nothing selected it edits the style the current tool will use next. So you can set up a colour and weight before you draw, or fix it afterwards, with the same controls.

Left to right: eight colour swatches plus a well for any custom colour; a Fill button with its own colour well; a Border button that shows or hides the frame on text boxes and callouts; a stroke width box labelled pt; an opacity slider labelled Op; and a font size box labelled Aa. When the selection carries text a text colour well appears, and for the two kinds that wrap text in a box — text and callouts — three alignment buttons.

Text colour, and the link toggle

Text and the shape around it can be coloured separately — a black note inside a red box, say. The control shows one of two states:

• A = Line (linked, the default) — the text simply follows whatever the main colour is. Change the swatch and both move together, exactly as RyDF always behaved.
• Unlinked — click the toggle and a separate text colour well appears. From then on the two are independent; click the toggle again to snap the text back to the line colour.

Every markup you made before this existed is linked, so nothing you've already drawn changes appearance.

Alignment

The three alignment buttons — left, centre, right — apply to callouts and text boxes, and only appear when one of those is selected. Alignment works within the markup's own box, so widening a callout re-flows the text to the new width and keeps it aligned.

Stamps are deliberately not in that list: a stamp's wording is positioned by dragging it anywhere inside the stamp, which gives you both axes rather than just three horizontal choices.

Selecting, moving and editing

With Select active, click a markup to select it — thin strokes have a generous invisible click target, so you don't have to be pixel-perfect. Shift-click adds or removes one. Dragging on empty page draws a dashed marquee and selects everything completely inside it; hold Shift while marqueeing to add to the selection.

Drag any selected markup to move it, and several selected markups move together. Handles appear when exactly one markup is selected: eight around boxes and strokes, a round handle at each end of lines, arrows and dimensions, and a handle on every corner of polylines and polygon clouds so you can reshape them point by point.

Esc steps back one level at a time — first it closes an open text editor, then it clears the selection, then it returns you to Select. Pressing Esc mid-drag abandons the move or resize and puts the markup back where it started, leaving no undo step behind.

Comments, statuses and replies

Select a single markup and a small panel appears beside it showing who made it, a status menu, a comment box, any replies, and a reply field. The statuses are No status, For review, Question, Done, Approved and Rejected, each colour-coded and reflected in the Markups list.

The comment box saves what you type when you click away, and it's undoable. Typing in the reply field and pressing Enter adds a reply stamped with your name and the date.

The panel deliberately doesn't appear for everything: it shows for Notes always, and for any other markup only once it already has a comment or a reply. That's why a plain rectangle looks like it has no comment field until you give it one.

Per-tool style memory

Every drawing tool keeps its own style. A rectangle's colour has no effect on the next ellipse, so you can keep red clouds, blue dimensions and black text going at once without constantly resetting the properties bar.

By default those memories keep themselves current: draw something and immediately restyle it, and that tool adopts the new look for next time. Restyling a markup you drew earlier never changes the tool's memory — only the most recently created markup of that kind does.

To set a tool deliberately, right-click its icon. A popover opens headed with the tool's name and the word defaults — for example Rectangle defaults — with rows for colour, fill, border, width, opacity, font size, and (for the stamp) its text. At the bottom is Auto-update from last created, ticked by default; untick it to pin the tool to exactly the style shown.

Tool styles survive quitting. Whatever each tool was last set to comes back on the next launch, along with the auto-update tick, so a palette you've tuned for a particular job is still there tomorrow. The factory settings — red, 2 pt, no fill, 100% opacity, 12 pt text and an APPROVED stamp — apply only on a first run.

Undo, redo and deleting

Undo (⌘Z) and redo (⌘⇧Z or ⌘Y) are keyboard-only — there are no toolbar buttons. They cover markup work: drawing, deleting, moving, resizing, restyling, retyping, comments, statuses, replies and scale changes. Each tab keeps its own undo history, up to 100 steps.

Delete with Delete or Backspace, or from the Markups list in the sidebar.

How scale works

Before RyDF can turn an on-screen distance into a real dimension, it needs to know the drawing's scale. You set that either by drawing a line across something whose true length you know, or by typing an architectural ratio such as 1/4"=1'.

Scale is stored per page, because drawing sets routinely mix plan scales. Both scale dialogs offer Apply to all pages for the common case where the whole set is at one scale, and you can copy a calibration from one sheet onto others.

All the measuring lives under the Measure tab: Dimension, Quick measure (not saved), Set scale from measurement, Set scale from ratio, and the snap toggle.

Set scale from measurement

1. Go to the Measure tab and click Set scale from measurement.
2. Press and drag along something whose real length you know — a dimension string, a grid bay, a door width. A dashed guide follows the drag.
3. Release. The dialog reports what you drew (“Measured 214.3 pt. This distance is:”) and offers a value box and a unit menu — mm, cm, m, in, ft.
4. Type the real length, tick Apply to all pages if the whole set is at this scale, and click Set scale.

A very short drag is ignored, so a stray click won't interrupt you. If what you typed can't be read, the box turns red with “Couldn't parse that measurement” and nothing is applied. The dialog can be dragged out of the way by its title bar.

Set scale from ratio

If the title block already states the scale, skip the drawing step. Click Set scale from ratio and the dialog opens straight away for the page you're on, prompting “Drawing scale — this much on paper:”.

The ratio is entered as two separate fields with an = between them, plus a unit menu for the result:

• Left — the paper distance. Whole, fractional or mixed values, with or without a unit: 1/4", 3/32, 1 1/2", 6mm. A bare number is read as inches.
• Right — the real-world distance it represents. 1', 20ft, 1'-6", 50. A bare number is read as whatever the unit menu is set to.
• The unit menu sets the unit measurements read out in afterwards — feet, inches, metres, millimetres and so on.

Both fields accept the same arithmetic and mixed-unit entry as the rest of RyDF, and the typographic marks macOS substitutes as you type (″ for inches, ′ for feet) are understood exactly like straight quotes.

Metric ratios work here too. A 1:50 drawing is 1 on paper = 50 with the unit menu on mm; 1:100 is 1 = 100. There's no need to go via a calibration drag.

Snapping to the drawing

Hitting a corner exactly at low zoom is fiddly, so the Measure tab has a snap toggle: “Snap to nearby PDF geometry (corners, line endpoints)”. Click it to turn snapping on — the button lights up — and both ends of your drag jump to the nearest real vector point within about a fingertip's distance on screen.

Snapping applies to all three measuring drags: the Set-scale calibration, the Dimension tool, and Quick measure. Turning it on once covers the lot.

It snaps to the endpoints of the drawing's own lines and paths. Text and images contribute nothing, and a purely scanned page has no vector geometry at all, so snapping will have nothing to grab there. The setting is off by default and remembered between launches.

Applying scale across pages

Once a page has a scale, the status bar shows it — for example Scale (p.3): 1 ft = 288 pt — and clicking that readout jumps straight back into recalibrating that page. Pages with no scale show nothing there. Setting a scale is undoable with ⌘Z.

To push one calibration across a set:

1. Calibrate one sheet.
2. In the Pages sidebar, right-click that sheet and choose Copy scale.
3. Select the sheets that share it — Shift-click a run, ⌘-click extras.
4. Right-click the selection and choose Paste scale to n pages.

Copy scale is only available when exactly one page is selected and it actually has a scale. The copied scale lasts for the session, so you can paste it onto several separate groups.

Dimensions and quick measure

Dimension (D) drags out a dimension line with arrowheads, tick marks and a label that stays the right way up for reading. The label shows the real length when the page has a scale (12.50 ft, 3.45 m) and falls back to the raw paper distance (214.3 pt) when it doesn't. Double-click a dimension with Select to override the label with your own wording; clear it again to go back to the automatic reading.

Dimensions are real markups — selectable, movable, restylable, commentable, saved, printed and flattened like anything else.

Quick measure (not saved) (M) is the disposable tape. Drag between two points for the same live reading. When you let go the measurement stays on screen, labelled temporary dimension underneath the figure so there's no mistaking it for a real one — handy when you want to read a number off while looking at something else, or compare it against the next one. The tool stays armed, so starting another drag replaces it; switching tools clears it.

Nothing is added to the document either way: a quick measure is never saved, printed or flattened, and there is nothing to undo.

Units and typing math

Preferences ▸ Units offers mm, in and pt, and defaults to inches. Crucially it only decides what a bare number means — every measurement field still accepts a unit typed after the number, and that unit wins.

These fields also do arithmetic. You can add, subtract, multiply, divide, use brackets and mix units freely: 1"+2mm, (3+1)/2, 1"-.5". Fractions read the way a tradesperson writes them — 1/8" is an eighth of an inch and 1 1/4" is one and a quarter, not one divided by four. Inch and foot marks work, as do the spelled-out names, and a comma is accepted as a decimal point.

Changing the unit preference doesn't alter anything already drawn or calibrated — it's purely about how numbers are typed and displayed.

Recognize Text on scanned sheets

A scanned drawing is just a picture: searching finds nothing and you can't drag-select a room name. Recognize Text (OCR) reads the picture, works out where every line of text sits, and writes those words back into the page as invisible text positioned exactly over the printed text.

Because the added text is invisible, the page renders identically — no boxes, no highlights, no change to line weights or printing. The only difference is that the words are now findable and selectable.

Running it

1. If you want a subset, select those pages in the Pages sidebar first.
2. Click OCR in the toolbar (just right of Export).
3. Choose Current page, Selected pages or All pages. It starts on Selected pages when you have a selection, otherwise Current page.
4. Click Recognize Text and watch the progress — “Recognizing text… page 8 of 12” with a running tally of text regions found.
5. Save the file so the recognised text is kept.

Click Cancel during a run to stop after the current page; everything recognised so far is kept. As soon as the run finishes, search and text selection pick up the new words — no need to close and reopen.

It runs on your Mac

Recognition uses the text-recognition engine built into macOS, running inside RyDF on your own machine. Confidential drawings are not sent to any cloud service, and OCR works with no internet connection. It's set to the accurate (slower, higher quality) mode, which is why a page can take a noticeable moment.

The Organize Pages grid

Open the Pages sidebar and click the grid button (“Organize pages (grid view)…”) for a large, full-window grid showing every page as a same-size tile — the way Acrobat Pro's page organizer works. It's a second face on the same tools that live in the Pages sidebar, and the two share your page selection.

When it opens, the view scrolls so the page you were reading is roughly centred. Close it with the ×, Esc, or by clicking outside.

What you can do here

• Select — click, ⌘-click to add or remove, Shift-click for a range. Clicking a tile only selects it; unlike the sidebar it doesn't jump the viewer.
• Rotate — each click turns the selected pages a quarter turn, and clicks accumulate.
• Delete — asks first, with a confirmation strip.
• Extract — writes the selected pages to a brand-new PDF; the original is untouched.
• Insert a PDF — drops every page of another file in after your selection.
• Insert blank pages — choose how many (1–999), before or after the reference page, and either the same size as that page or a size you pick.
• Reorder — drag a tile; a coloured line marks where it will land.

Rotation is a real change to the page, not a viewing preference: a rotated sheet is rotated everywhere — viewer, thumbnails, print and export.

Three actions commit page changes to a file: Save markups (⌘S) rewrites the original in place with both markups and the new page arrangement; Export ▸ Save a Copy… writes a new PDF; Export ▸ Flattened PDF… writes a new PDF with markups burned in.

The print window

Press ⌘P or click the printer icon at the top right of the toolbar. RyDF never opens the macOS print sheet — it builds and submits the job itself, which is what lets it stream a very large drawing set to the printer page by page instead of assembling the whole thing in memory first.

The window splits in two: settings on the left, a live single-sheet preview on the right. The trade-off for the custom dialog is that printer-specific panes you may be used to in the macOS sheet aren't available — only the settings in this window are sent.

Destination and paper

Destination lists every printer the Mac knows about, with your system default pre-selected and marked. The last entry is always Save as PDF…, which writes the job to a file instead (the main button then reads Save PDF). The circular arrow beside the menu re-scans for printers. A disabled printer is flagged with “Printer is not accepting jobs” — you can still submit; the job simply waits in the queue.

Paper size is a button, not a plain menu. Clicking it drops a two-column panel headed Size and Dimensions, listing every paper the selected printer reports along with its actual measurements. That layout exists precisely because a plotter can report dozens of sizes whose names alone — Arch E versus Ansi E versus a bare 30x42 — aren't enough to tell them apart.

RyDF recognises the architectural and engineering series (Arch A–E, Ansi A–E), the ISO A series, the ISO and JIS B series, Letter, Legal, Tabloid, Executive and common envelopes, plus self-describing and bare width-by-height names that plotter drivers often use. Measurements are shown in whatever you've set under Preferences ▸ Units.

Pages, copies and sides

Pages offers All pages, Current page, Custom range, and — when you have pages selected in the sidebar — Selected pages. A custom range takes something like 1-5, 8, 11-13, and an open-ended range such as 3- means page 3 to the end. It prints in the order you type, so 5,1,3 prints those three in that order.

The range resets to All pages every time you open the window — deliberately not remembered from the last job.

Copies takes 1–999, with a Collate checkbox that becomes available once you ask for more than one. Two-sided appears only when the selected printer reports duplex, offering long-edge and short-edge flips. Pick a printer that can't do it and the setting resets itself rather than being sent silently.

Scale, orientation and the preview

Scale offers Fit to printable area (the default — scaled to fill the sheet inside a small margin, proportions preserved), Actual size (100%), and Custom… which reveals a percentage field accepting 10–1000%.

Orientation offers Auto (per page), Portrait and Landscape. Auto is the default and decides page by page — a page wider than it is tall is turned to sit on the sheet. That's what you want for a mixed set of portrait specs and landscape plans.

The preview shows one sheet at a time using exactly the same arithmetic the output uses, including pages that overflow and get clipped. Arrows step through the pages the job will actually produce, with a readout like Page 14 (3 of 9) — document page number first, then its position in the job. The caption underneath summarises the job: sheet count, paper name, and where relevant Two-sided, Grayscale and the raster resolution.

Vector versus Raster

Vector (fast, original quality) is the default. It hands the PDF to the printer essentially untouched — quickest, and line work stays perfectly crisp.

Raster (most reliable for huge files) renders every page itself, composites your markups onto it, and streams the result to the printer one page at a time. Because only one page is ever held in memory, this is the mode that gets a thousand-page set or a monster CAD sheet out of a printer that would otherwise choke — and the printer starts working while later pages are still rendering. Choosing Raster reveals a resolution menu of 150, 300 and 600 dpi (300 is the default).

Choosing a Custom scale switches the method to Raster for you, because custom scaling requires it.

Running the job

Under Options, Include markups is on by default (switch it off to print the clean drawing) and Reverse order prints back to front. Job name is what appears in the print queue and the suggested file name when saving to PDF.

Once you click Print, the window turns into a progress view: “Preparing document…”, then “Rendering page 3 of 40…”, then “Spooling to printer…”. Cancel works throughout — it stops rendering and pulls the job back out of the queue if it already reached it. On success the bar turns green and the window closes itself. On failure it turns red and shows the underlying error as selectable text so you can copy it.

Everything except the destination, the page range and the job name is remembered for next time.

Saving your markups

The toolbar's Save markups button and ⌘S do the same thing: they write your markups directly into the PDF you have open, in place. No separate file has to travel alongside the drawing — emailing or uploading that one PDF carries the whole set with it, and reopening it in RyDF restores every markup exactly as you left it, including per-page scales, comments, replies and statuses.

Saving replaces the file safely: RyDF writes the new version alongside and swaps it into place, so an interrupted save can't leave you with a truncated drawing.

A dot appears next to the Save button, on the tab, and in the status bar whenever you have unsaved markup changes.

Closing the window with unsaved work

If any tab has unsaved markups when you close RyDF, it stops and asks first — Save before quitting?, telling you how many documents are affected:

• Cancel — stay where you are, nothing happens.
• Don't Save — quit and discard everything since the last autosave.
• Save & Quit — write every dirty tab to its PDF, then quit.

The same question is asked for ⌘Q, and when an update is ready to install. With nothing unsaved, quitting is immediate and you see no prompt.

If a save fails — the file is read-only, or the drive it lives on has gone away — RyDF stays open and says so, rather than quitting and taking the markups with it. Use Export ▸ Save a Copy… to put them somewhere that works.

Autosave and crash safety

Between explicit saves, RyDF writes your markups to a small companion file next to the drawing (the file name with .markups.json added). That's the crash-safety net: if the app or the machine goes down, reopening the drawing brings back everything the last autosave captured. It deliberately uses this lightweight file rather than rewriting the whole PDF, because rewriting a large drawing every few seconds would be far too slow.

Autosave runs for every open tab, not just the one in front, and it also fires at natural moments — opening a different drawing into a tab with unsaved edits, and closing a tab with unsaved edits.

Set the frequency under Preferences ▸ Autosave markups: Off, On edits (about a second after each change) or Every… minutes (the default, at 5). Whatever you choose, ⌘S always works.

Save a Copy and Flattened PDF

Both live under the toolbar's Export menu.

Save a Copy…

Writes a new PDF (suggested name ends -copy.pdf) and leaves your original exactly as it is. The copy carries your markups twice over: as real PDF annotations that Preview, Acrobat and others understand, and as an exact hidden record that lets the copy be reopened in RyDF and edited further.

Fidelity in other viewers varies by type. Stamps, signatures, freehand ink and highlighter are reproduced pixel-for-pixel. Rectangles, ellipses, clouds, text boxes, callouts, notes, dimensions and text highlight/underline/strikeout come across with their position, colour, opacity, author and comment, but each viewer draws them in its own style. Straight lines, arrows and polylines can't be written as PDF annotations at all — they're absent in other viewers, though still fully present when the copy is reopened in RyDF.

Flattened PDF… (⌘E)

Paints every markup permanently onto the page (suggested name ends -flattened.pdf). Pages with no markups are passed through untouched, so their original crispness and searchable text are preserved.

Which one to use

A copy that comes back to you from someone else opens fully editable in RyDF as long as it was made with Save a Copy, even with no companion file beside it — RyDF finds the markup record inside the PDF and restores it.

Every setting, and what it defaults to

Preferences lives behind the gear button at the far right of the toolbar — that's the only way in; there's no keyboard shortcut. It's a single scrolling list, and every change takes effect the moment you make it. The only button is Done; Esc or a click outside closes it too.

Appearance follows your Mac by default and flips live when macOS switches, including on a day/night schedule.

Page cache (RAM) is how much memory RyDF may use to keep rendered pages warm so scrolling back to a sheet is instant. Raise it for huge files if you have the RAM to spare; the panel shows your total RAM and how much of the cache is in use.

Units only sets what a bare number means — every field still accepts a typed unit and simple math. See Units and typing math.

Settings are stored on your Mac, not in your PDFs. Resetting or losing them costs you nothing but the settings.

Checking, downloading and installing

Under Preferences ▸ Software updates you'll find the check policy (On launch, Every… days, Manually), which version you have, and a Check for Updates Now button with the date of the last check.

A manual check always reports its result: a newer version opens the update prompt, nothing newer gives you “You're up to date — RyDF is the newest version.”, and a network problem says so. Automatic checks fail silently by design — they never interrupt you.

When a newer version is found you get a prompt headed “RyDF version is available” showing what changed since your version, not just the newest entry. Three buttons: Update Now downloads and installs, Remind Me Tomorrow snoozes the automatic prompt for 24 hours, and Don't Update pins that specific version so automatic checks stop offering it (a later release still will).

What happens when you install

1. Press Update Now. The dialog shows a progress bar and byte count while the installer downloads to your Downloads folder. Cancel is available throughout.
2. If any tab has unsaved markups, RyDF stops and asks — “Save your markups?” — with Save & Quit, Don't Save and Cancel. A session with nothing unsaved skips this.
3. RyDF opens the installer disk image so Finder's drag-to-Applications window appears, then quits itself — so you can drop the new version straight over the old one without being told the app is in use.
4. Drag RyDF into Applications, replacing the old copy, and open the new one.

Everything at a glance

Commands

Viewing

Tools

Worth knowing before you rely on it

RyDF is alpha software. These are the things most likely to surprise you:

• Page operations can't be undone. Rotate, delete, reorder and insert are one-way; ⌘Z covers markups only. Close without saving to back out.
• ⌘S markups aren't visible in other viewers. Use Save a Copy for that — and note that lines, arrows and polylines have no PDF-standard equivalent, so they don't appear in other apps even then.
• Password-protected PDFs can't be opened. There's no password prompt; remove it elsewhere first.
• Markups made in other apps show but can't be edited. A sheet marked up in Bluebeam or Acrobat looks right, but those annotations are part of the page as far as RyDF is concerned — they can't be selected, don't appear in the Markups list, and always print.
• Signatures are session-only unless you ask otherwise. Tick Remember on this Mac in the signature dialog to keep one between launches; left off, it's discarded when you quit. (Tool styles are remembered now, without asking.)
• Running OCR twice on a page stacks two text layers. Run it once.
• Distance only — there's no area or perimeter measurement in this build.
• Apple Silicon, macOS 11+. No Windows or Linux version.