User Manual — GravesPDF

1. Opening documents

Open...Choose a PDF from disk.

The arrow beside OpenThe last twelve documents you opened. Click one to reopen it, or the X beside it to forget it. Documents that have since been moved or deleted are dropped from the list rather than offered.

You can also start GravesPDF with a file:

WindowsGravesPDF.exe "C:\path\to\document.pdf"

LinuxGravesPDF /path/to/document.pdf

This is what makes “Open with” and file associations work.

2. Reading

The document scrolls continuously. Pages are drawn as they come into view and released as they leave, so a thousand-page file opens as quickly as a one-page one.

Width / PageFit the page to the window’s width, or fit the whole page.

− / +Zoom between 10% and 800%.

Arrows, page boxMove between pages, or type a page number to jump to it.

Rotate buttonsTurn the view in 90-degree steps. This changes how the document is displayed, not the document itself.

GravesPDF showing a document in continuous scroll with the page thumbnail sidebar open. — The reading view, with the Pages panel showing thumbnails.

3. Tabs

Every document you open gets its own tab. Opening a file that is already open brings its tab to the front rather than loading a second copy of it, so two tabs can never disagree about the same file.

Each tab keeps its own place: switch away, come back, and you are where you left off. Closing a tab with unsaved changes asks first, because edits live in a working copy until you save them.

Ctrl+WClose the current tab.

File › Close All TabsCloses the lot, asking about each one that has unsaved changes and stopping at the first you decline.

With nothing open, the window shows the documents you opened recently. They are also under File › Open Recent at any time.

4. The menu bar

FileOpen, the recent list, Save As, Print, closing tabs, Exit.

EditFind, replace text on the page, delete the selected note.

ViewZoom, fit, rotate, paging, and the sidebar.

DocumentSigning, the page operations, and the form controls.

HelpThis manual, the licence, the privacy statement.

Everything in the menus is also on the toolbar. The menus are there so you can find a thing you have not used before without hunting for its symbol.

Alt+F, Alt+E, Alt+V, Alt+D and Alt+H open the menus; the arrow keys move through them.

The View menu open, showing zoom, fit, rotate, paging and sidebar commands with their shortcuts. — The View menu.

The Document menu open, showing signing, page operations and form commands. — The Document menu.

5. Keyboard and screen readers

Everything in GravesPDF can be reached from the keyboard. Tab moves between controls, Space or Enter activates the one you are on, and every control tells a screen reader what it is, including the buttons that show only a symbol.

Ctrl+OOpen a document.

Ctrl+SSave As.

Ctrl+PPrint.

Ctrl+HFind and replace text on the page.

Ctrl+BShow or hide the sidebar.

Ctrl+FSearch this document.

Ctrl+WClose the current tab.

Ctrl+plus / minusZoom in or out.

Ctrl+0Fit the page width.

Ctrl+1Fit the whole page.

Page Up / DownMove to the previous or next page.

6. Languages

GravesPDF is translated into 55 languages, listed under Language in the toolbar, each written in its own script. The fonts for every one of them are built into the application, so the translations read correctly on a machine that has no fonts of its own for that script.

Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Sindhi and Uyghur turn the whole interface right to left. The document itself is never mirrored: a page is shown the way its author laid it out.

Changing the language takes effect the next time GravesPDF starts.

The language dropdown open, listing the available languages each written in its own script. — The Language list, each entry in its own script.

7. The sidebar

PagesThumbnails, and the page editing tools described below.

OutlineThe document’s bookmarks, where it has them. Click to jump.

SearchFind text anywhere in the document. Results show the page number and the surrounding words; click one to go there.

SignaturesEvery digital signature in the document, and whether it is valid.

NotesEvery annotation, with tools to edit or delete it.

FormFillable form fields, where the document has them.

The list button in the toolbar hides and shows the sidebar.

The Search panel showing a match with its page number and the surrounding sentence. — Search results carry the page number and the words around the hit.

8. Annotations

Pick a tool in the toolbar, choose a colour, then work on the page:

HighlightDrag across text. The highlight snaps to the words you covered rather than tracing your drag exactly. Over an image or blank space it uses the shape you drew.

NoteClick to place a sticky note, then type its text.

RectangleDrag to draw a box.

FreehandDrag to draw a line.

With no tool selected (the cross-arrows button), click an annotation to select it. Drag it to move it, or drag a corner handle to resize it. Every annotation is faintly outlined so you can see what can be grabbed.

Selecting an annotation also opens an editor in the Notes panel, where you can change its text or colour. The X beside each entry deletes it.

A page with a yellow highlight, a green highlight over two lines, and a red rectangle annotation. — Highlights snapped to the covered words, and a rectangle annotation.

The Notes panel listing each annotation with its page number and a delete button. — The Notes panel.

9. Pages

Select thumbnails in the Pages panel — ctrl-click or shift-click for several — then use the buttons above the list:

RotateTurn the selected pages. Unlike the toolbar rotate, this changes the document.

Up / DownMove a page. Select exactly one page to do this.

XDelete the selected pages. A document always keeps one page.

ExtractWrite the selected pages to a new file, leaving this one alone.

+Insert all pages of another PDF after the selection.

MergeAppend other PDFs to this one, as a new document.

10. Forms

The Form panel lists a document’s fillable fields. Type into them, tick checkboxes, choose from dropdowns, then:

Apply valuesWrite the values into the document.

Apply and lock fieldsWrite the values and mark every field read-only. Note this does not remove the form: the values stay readable, they simply can no longer be edited.

11. Editing text

“Text...” finds and replaces text that is already on the page.

Press Find first. It reports how many matches it can change and, where it cannot, why. Two limits come from how PDF works rather than from GravesPDF:

Nothing reflows. A page holds positioned text, not paragraphs, so a longer replacement will overrun whatever follows it.
Some documents use fonts that store glyph numbers rather than letters, or embed only the characters the document already used. Text in those cannot be re-typed, and GravesPDF will tell you rather than produce blanks.

12. Signing

“Sign...” signs the document with a certificate, either from a PFX/P12 file or from your operating system’s certificate store.

You can add a reason and a location, and place a visible signature block on any page by setting its position and size in points from the page’s top-left corner (a US Letter page is 612 by 792 points). Signing writes a new file; the original is untouched.

The Signatures panel checks every signature in a document and reports two things separately: whether the document was altered after signing, and whether the signature covers the whole file. A signature can be valid over part of a file while the rest was changed afterwards.

GravesPDF does not check whether a signing certificate is trusted or has been revoked. A signature reported as valid means the bytes are intact, not that the signer is who they claim to be.

13. Printing

“Print...” offers your installed printers, the number of copies, and whether to print everything, the current page, or a range such as 1-3, 7, 12.

Printing uses whatever you have already edited but not yet saved.

14. Saving

Edits do not touch the file on disk. They accumulate in a working copy, and the status bar shows “unsaved changes” while any are pending. “Save As...” writes them to a file you choose.

This means the document you opened is never modified, and a failed edit cannot damage it.