PDFrio — Better PDF Viewer

About

PDFrio is a privacy-first PDF viewer, editor, and tool suite for Chrome. Open any PDF and get a real editor instead of Chrome's basic built-in viewer — highlight, draw, take notes, read aloud, switch to night mode, search across pages, and access 8 PDF tools (merge, split, compress, sign, convert, and more) from a single toolbar icon.

Nothing leaves your device. Every feature runs locally in your browser using bundled JavaScript libraries. There are no servers, no accounts, no analytics, no tracking — and no remote code. The libraries the extension uses are packaged inside the install and reviewed by the Chrome Web Store.

WHY PDFRIO

Chrome's built-in PDF viewer is fine for viewing, but it can't:
• Add sticky notes you can re-open later
• Toggle night or sepia reading modes for evening reading
• Read PDFs aloud using your operating system's voices
• Keep annotations separate from the PDF file (so the original isn't modified)
• Launch tools to merge, split, compress, sign, or convert PDFs

PDFrio adds all of these without changing how you open PDFs. Click any .pdf link, or a downloaded PDF, and PDFrio opens automatically.

WHAT'S INSIDE

Viewer:
• Replaces Chrome's built-in PDF viewer for every .pdf URL you open
• Text selection and copy
• Find in document (Ctrl+F) with match-by-match navigation
• Thumbnails sidebar with click-to-jump
• Page navigation, zoom, keyboard shortcuts
• Download the original PDF anytime

Annotations:
• Highlight selected text in five colors
• Free-form pen drawing
• Sticky notes with searchable text content
• Erase tool to remove any annotation
• All annotations saved in your browser's local storage, keyed to the PDF URL

Reading aids:
• Night mode (inverted colors with hue correction)
• Sepia mode (warmer tone, easier on the eyes)
• Read-aloud using your operating system's voices
• Reading mode preference persists across sessions

Tools (8 tools, launched from the toolbar icon):
• PDF Editor — full-featured editor with text, images, signatures
• Merge — combine multiple PDFs
• Split — extract pages or split into ranges
• Compress — shrink large PDFs
• Sign — draw or type a signature
• Image → PDF — convert JPG, PNG, WebP to PDF
• PDF → Image — export pages as JPG or PNG
• Compare — side-by-side text comparison

PRIVACY-FIRST DESIGN

• No file uploads. PDFs are loaded into your browser's memory and processed locally.
• No accounts. The extension never asks you to sign in.
• No analytics or tracking. There is no Google Analytics, no Sentry, no telemetry of any kind.
• No remote code. All JavaScript libraries are bundled inside the extension.
• Annotations stored locally in your browser (chrome.storage.local). Uninstalling the extension removes them.
• Open the privacy policy at https://pdfrio.priodemy.com/privacy

WORKS WITH

• Local PDF files (file:// URLs) — requires you to enable "Allow access to file URLs" in chrome://extensions for the PDFrio entry. Chrome requires this to be a user action.
• Any .pdf URL on the web
• Right-click any PDF link and choose "Open with PDFrio"

FREE FOREVER

Every feature is free. There is no premium tier on the extension or the web app. PDFrio is built by Priodemy as a counter-example to the standard PDF SaaS pattern of charging for basic features.

About PDFrio: a privacy-first PDF toolkit available as a Chrome extension, an Android app, and a web app at pdfrio.priodemy.com. Built by Priodemy.

Questions or feedback: [email protected]