Support

The current release is 2.2.1 on Linux and 2.2.0 on Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android.

• Windows the ⋯ button at the end of the toolbar → Settings, then scroll to the bottom of the panel.
• Mac the MegaPDF menu → About MegaPDF.
• iPhone / iPad the ⓘ button on the home screen, or ⋯ More → About MegaPDF while a document is open.
• Android the same two places: ⓘ on the home screen, or ⋯ → About MegaPDF.
• Linux there is no About window you can reach in this build — a real gap, and ours to fix. Meanwhile run megapdf-cli --version in a terminal, or ask your package manager which version of megapdf it installed.

Nobody needs the PDF engine's version: no screen shows it, so don't go looking for it.

MegaPDF has no update check, on any platform. It opens no network connection of its own at all, so it cannot tell you a new version exists. Updates arrive the way your system's other software does:

• Windows through the Microsoft Store.
• Mac · iPhone · iPad through the App Store.
• Android through Google Play.
• Linux with your system updates if you used our APT repository; automatically from the Snap Store; by itself if you installed a Flatpak. A .deb or a tarball you downloaded by hand gets no updates — you would come back for the next one.

MegaPDF is fully translated into Canadian French and European French, and nothing else yet.

• Windows it has its own setting: ⋯ → Settings → Language, offering Windows' choice, English, French (Canada) or French (France). It takes effect when you restart MegaPDF.
• Mac · Linux it follows your system language; there is no setting in the app.
• Android no setting in the app, but Android 13 and newer let you choose one per app: Settings → Apps → MegaPDF → Language.
• iPhone / iPad the same idea in iOS: Settings → MegaPDF → Language.

Found French that reads wrongly? That is worth telling us — write down the exact words you saw.

Save writes over the document you opened, in place. MegaPDF writes the new file beside it, reopens it to check it can be read, and only then swaps it in — so a failed save leaves your original exactly as it was, and says so.

Save As and Save a copy make a second file, wherever your system's save panel puts it. On Windows, Mac, Linux and Android that new file then becomes the document you are working on, and further saves go to it.

iPhone / iPad Save a copy is different there, and it has caught people out. The copy is written where you chose, but MegaPDF carries on pointing at the file you opened — which still has none of your edits, even though the app stops warning you about unsaved changes. If you meant to change the original, use Save. We know about this one; a report from you still helps.

If MegaPDF says "There is nowhere to save this back to", the document came from somewhere it cannot write to — a mail attachment, a read-only folder, or a permission your system has since withdrawn. Use Save As and pick a place.

Whiteout (called Cover on the Mac) draws a block over the page. What is underneath is still in the file, and another app can copy or search it. MegaPDF says so the first time you use it.

Redact takes the content out of the file. You mark areas, and nothing happens until you save: MegaPDF asks first, and offers to write a separate -redacted copy rather than overwrite your original. Until then a mark can be selected, moved, resized and deleted, and Undo puts a cleared mark back.

Redaction refuses rather than half-doing it. If it cannot remove everything you marked on a page, it removes nothing, leaves the file alone, and names the reason — a font it cannot redraw around your mark, a drawing block it cannot take apart safely, or a removal that would change the page outside the areas you marked. That is worth reporting: quote the message it showed you.

MegaPDF can retype a document's own text, but it will not do it if the rest of the page would move. Before committing, it rewrites the page on a copy and compares the result with the original, pixel by pixel; if anything outside your edit shifts, it declines and says which way it would have gone wrong — the spacing of other text, the look of the page, or text moving elsewhere on it.

The way through is the one it suggests: cover the line and type over the top. On Windows, Mac and Linux the message says so; on Android, iPhone and iPad it currently doesn't, which is our omission rather than a different limitation.

If the page is a scan, there is no text to edit at all — it is a photograph of a page. MegaPDF says so, and covering and typing is the only route.

A page where you believe the edit was safe and MegaPDF still refused is a genuinely useful report. Tell us what you were changing, and what kind of document it is.

Some forms — often government or bank ones — are not really PDF forms. They are Adobe LiveCycle (XFA) programs wrapped in a PDF, and only Adobe's own Reader can fill them in. No other app can, MegaPDF included, and it is not something we can fix at our end.

MegaPDF tells you rather than failing quietly, and everything else still works: you can view it, print it, save it and send it on. Fill it in Adobe Reader, or print it and fill it in by hand.

Give MegaPDF the password and it opens the document normally. If it says the PDF "uses a kind of protection MegaPDF can't open", it is an unusual security handler we do not support, and no password will help.

A document can also be restricted by its owner while still opening without a password. Then only some tools work, MegaPDF shows a banner saying so, and the Unlock button takes the owner password. Which tools go quiet depends on what the owner forbade: editing the page's own text and Whiteout need permission to modify, printing needs permission to print, rotating and deleting and reordering pages need permission to assemble, and changing or removing the password needs full access. Saving a copy is never blocked.

MegaPDF can also set, change or remove a password on a document you can fully open. It cannot recover a forgotten one — nothing can.

One thing worth knowing: on Windows, Mac and Linux, crash recovery is switched off for password-protected documents, deliberately, because the recovery journal would otherwise hold their text in the clear.

MegaPDF handles two different things here. A real form field is part of the document, and you fill it in directly. A printed square or a ruled line is just ink on the page — MegaPDF recognises many drawn checkboxes that other apps treat as decoration, and where it doesn't, the answer is to place a checkmark or a text box yourself and drag it onto the line.

If a real field refuses, the usual causes are the two elsewhere in this list: the form needs Adobe Reader, or its owner restricted filling it in. Both make MegaPDF say so rather than do nothing.

A printed checkbox MegaPDF should have spotted and didn't is a good report — tell us what the form is, and whether the box is drawn as a square, a circle or a line.

Three ways in: draw it, type it, or photograph the one you sign on paper — in which case MegaPDF drops the white background so only the ink lands on the page. Then place it, move it and resize it until it sits on the line.

This is the handwritten kind — an electronic signature, a picture of your name on the page. It is not a digital signature, the cryptographic kind backed by a certificate, and placing one does not make the document verifiable, certified or tamper-evident. If a document you were sent already carries a digital signature of its own, see A document that already has a digital signature.

Your signatures are stored in MegaPDF's own private storage on that device and nowhere else. They are not synced, not backed up by us, and not shared between your devices — there is no server for them to sync through. Deleting one deletes its file, and uninstalling takes the library with it. Linux is the exception: package managers leave your own files alone, so the library stays in ~/.local/share/MegaPDF until you delete it.

On Windows, Mac and Linux it is a second file type in Save As; on Android, iPhone and iPad it is its own Export as Markdown. It is an export, not a save: your PDF is untouched, and still counts as having unsaved changes if it had them.

It keeps headings, paragraphs, bold and italic, lists and their numbering, the values filled into form fields, and tables — the last of those only from documents that were tagged properly when they were made.

It does not keep images (none at all), hyperlinks, colours, fonts and sizes, page layout, or annotations. A page with no text layer is marked as such rather than guessed at. Line breaks inside an ordinary paragraph cannot be recovered from a PDF, so they are not.

The same text comes out of a terminal with megapdf-cli extract, on Linux, Windows and Mac.

On Windows, Mac and Linux, MegaPDF keeps a journal of the edits you make — a list of what you did, not a copy of your file — and offers to put them back next time you open that document. It never writes to your PDF without being asked: restoring reopens the document with the changes in place, still unsaved.

Two cases where there is nothing to restore, both deliberate: a password-protected document is never journalled, and Android, iPhone and iPad have no journal at all — their undo history lasts as long as the app is open.

One case that is not deliberate: if the document has been moved or renamed between the crash and reopening, the offer silently doesn't appear. Put the file back where it was and try again.

A crash is always worth reporting. Nothing is sent to us automatically — there is no crash reporting in MegaPDF — so a crash we are not told about is a crash we don't know about. What you were doing in the few seconds before it is the most useful part.

Large files are meant to work: a multi-gigabyte document opens straight away rather than being read into memory first, banner-sized pages measure at their real size, and picture-heavy pages draw several times faster than they used to.

The hard ceiling is 4 GB. Above that the PDF engine cannot address the file, and MegaPDF says it is too large to open rather than trying and failing slowly.

A file under that which is slow, or that fails to open, is a report we want: its size, its page count if you know it, and where it came from. Don't attach it — we will ask if we need to.

All of it is there: rotate, delete, move, insert a blank page, bring pages in from another PDF, and save a selection of pages as their own file.

Two refusals you may meet. A PDF must have at least one page, so the last one cannot be deleted — use Save Selected Pages As to keep only some. And on a small number of documents, about one in a hundred, copying pages out is refused because their form fields belong to a group MegaPDF cannot carry across and the copy would lose the fields' names; MegaPDF changes nothing rather than hand you a quietly broken file.

If the document's owner restricted it, the page tools need the owner password.

Some documents carry a digital signature: a cryptographic one, made with a certificate, that lets a reader check the document has not changed since it was signed. This is not the same thing as the signature you place from your own library, and MegaPDF cannot create one.

Changing such a PDF invalidates its digital signature — that is the entire point of one, and no app can alter a document and keep its signature valid. MegaPDF warns you before it saves over one, and offers to save a copy so the signed original survives.

Some documents go further and are certified: their author declared that they should not be changed at all. MegaPDF says so in stronger words, and the advice is the same — work on a copy.

Printing goes through your own system, not through us. Your computer's print dialog is what finds the printers, including any on your network; on a Mac, macOS asks your permission before it looks, and MegaPDF supplies the reason you are shown. On Linux you pick a printer in MegaPDF's print window and the document goes to CUPS, your system's own printing service.

So a printer that doesn't appear is almost always your system's business rather than MegaPDF's — try printing something else first. If MegaPDF prints the wrong thing, though, that one is ours: tell us what came out.

MegaPDF opens no network connection of its own, on any platform. There is no account, no sign-in, no analytics and no crash reporting, and your documents and signatures never leave your device because there is no server for them to go to. Printing is the only place a network is involved at all, and it is your computer's.

You don't have to take our word for it. On Android the app asks for no permissions at all; on iOS it requests no network entitlement; on a Mac its sandbox grants it no network access; on Windows it declares no network capability. And the whole source is public, so anyone can look.

The full detail is in the privacy policy, which also covers this website and what happens to a support message once you have sent it.

• Windows Windows 10 version 1809 or newer, Intel/AMD or ARM, from the Microsoft Store.
• Mac macOS 12 Monterey or newer, Apple silicon or Intel.
• iPhone / iPad iOS or iPadOS 16 or newer.
• Android Android 8.0 or newer.
• Linux a 64-bit desktop with glibc 2.35 or newer — Ubuntu 22.04 and its contemporaries, and anything since.

Below those, the stores will not offer you the app, and there is no older build to fall back on. There is also a command-line tool, megapdf-cli, for Linux, Windows and Mac, which pulls the text out of a PDF and rearranges its pages without a screen.