Quick start

Up and running in five minutes.

The essentials — open a drawing, review it, measure it, and get it on paper.

1 · Open a PDF

Click Open PDF on the start screen, drag a file onto the window, or double-click a PDF in Finder once RyDF is your default opener. Big files open straight to page 1 while the rest streams in — no waiting on a spinner. Open more than one and they stack up as tabs you can flip between instantly.

Move around with scroll and pinch-to-zoom (or ⌘+ / ⌘−), jump to a page with the page box, and use the Pages, Outline and Search tabs in the sidebar.

2 · Mark it up

Pick a tool from the toolbar — the tools are grouped by category:

Shapes & clouds — rectangles, ellipses, revision clouds, lines, arrows, polylines.
Text — text boxes, callouts and sticky notes.
Draw — freehand ink and a highlighter.
Stamp — reusable stamps with repositionable text.
Signature — sign by typing your name in a cursive style, or import an image (RyDF can knock out a white background).

Set color, fill, stroke width and opacity in the properties bar. Select any markup to move, resize or restyle it — and your last-used style becomes the default for the next one of that kind.

Saving. Press ⌘S and your markups are written into the PDF itself — one file, no stray sidecar. Reopen it in RyDF later and the markups are still fully editable. (Autosave keeps a lightweight backup between saves.)

3 · Measure to scale

Choose the Measure tools, then Calibrate.
Draw a line across something whose real length you know — a dimension string, a known wall. Turn on snap to geometry to lock onto the drawing's own line endpoints.
Type the real length and units. That sets the page's scale.
Now measure freely — distances and areas read out in your units. Need a one-off? The quick-measure tape shows a distance and leaves nothing behind. Scale is remembered per page, so mixed-scale sets just work.

4 · OCR a scan (optional)

If a page is a scan or image with no selectable text, click OCR, choose the current page / selected pages / all pages, and RyDF recognizes the text with on-device Apple Vision and bakes in an invisible, searchable layer. The scan becomes selectable and searchable — in RyDF and anywhere else the PDF goes.

5 · Organize & print

In the Pages sidebar (or the full grid view) you can rotate, delete, extract, insert and reorder pages by drag-and-drop. When you're ready, hit Print (⌘P): choose a paper size, scale to fit, print the whole document or just the pages you selected, and check the preview before it goes.

That's the whole loop. For deeper questions, see the FAQ; to install, head to Downloads.