A fast, private PDF reader with an AI assistant that runs on your own computer.
Download for Mac · Get it for Windows · What's new · Report a problem
Read any PDF, then ask it questions: "What is this document about?", "What does section 3 say about pricing?", "What's on the last page?". Every answer links to the pages it comes from. Click a link and Leafrune scrolls there and highlights the sentence.
Your documents never leave your computer. There is no account, no cloud, no telemetry. After a one-time model download, Leafrune works fully offline.
Beta. Leafrune 0.9 is free to use and still being polished. Please report anything that looks wrong; that is how the beta gets better.
- Download
- Installing
- First launch
- What Leafrune can do
- The assistant
- Keyboard shortcuts
- System requirements
- Privacy
- Known limitations
- Feedback
- Uninstalling
- License
| System | Download |
|---|---|
| macOS (Apple silicon: M1 or later) | Leafrune_0.9.5_aarch64.dmg (0.9.5 Beta) |
| Windows 10 / 11 (64-bit) | Microsoft Store (0.9.3 Beta) |
Every Mac download is listed on the Releases
page. To check that the DMG is complete and unchanged, compare its SHA-256 with
the release's SHA256SUMS.txt. In Terminal:
shasum -a 256 ~/Downloads/Leafrune_0.9.5_aarch64.dmg- Open
Leafrune_0.9.5_aarch64.dmgfrom your Downloads folder. - In the window that appears, drag Leafrune onto the Applications folder.
- Eject the Leafrune disk (the eject button next to it in the Finder sidebar).
- Open Leafrune from your Applications folder.
The beta is not notarized by Apple yet, so the first time macOS says it cannot verify Leafrune and does not open it. This is expected; allow it once:
- Click Done in that message.
- Open System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security and scroll down to Security. Next to the message that Leafrune was blocked, click Open Anyway.
- Click Open Anyway again and enter your password. Leafrune opens, and from now on it opens normally.
Leafrune can become your default PDF app: select any PDF in Finder, choose File ▸ Get Info, set Open with to Leafrune, then click Change All… to use it for every PDF.
- Open Leafrune in the Microsoft Store and click Get (or Install).
- Open Leafrune from the Start menu. The Store keeps it up to date.
Leafrune can become your default PDF app: right-click any PDF ▸ Open with ▸ Choose another app ▸ Leafrune ▸ Always.
- Leafrune opens straight away and you can start reading.
- In the background it downloads its two AI models once from Hugging Face (about 3.2 GB on a Mac, about 531 MB on Windows). Nothing is shown unless you open the assistant, where you can follow the progress.
- On a Mac, the first time you open the assistant, macOS prepares the graphics processor for it. This takes about 20 seconds, once.
- A dropped connection is no problem: the download continues where it stopped, even after a restart, and every file is checked before use.
- After that, Leafrune never needs the internet again.
Reading
- Open PDFs from the Open… button, by dragging them onto the window, from the Recent list, or by double-clicking them in Finder or File Explorer.
- Leafrune remembers where you were in every document and reopens the last one where you left off.
- Zoom, fit to page or width, Ctrl+mouse wheel and touchpad pinch.
- Rotate sideways pages; the rotation is remembered per document.
- Sidebar with the table of contents and page thumbnails.
- Back and Forward through your jumps (links, contents, search results, citations), like a web browser.
- Find in the document, with every match highlighted.
- Password-protected PDFs (the password is never stored).
- Links in a PDF open in your web browser or mail app.
- Copy text, or right-click a page to Copy Page as Image.
Forms (Mac, 0.9.5)
- Fill in text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons and drop-down lists.
- Save (⌘S) writes the values into the same PDF; Save a Copy… (⇧⌘S) writes them to a new file and leaves the original as it was. Other PDF apps show the saved values.
- Unsaved changes show in the title. Closing, opening another PDF or quitting asks whether to save them.
- PDFs that do not allow filling in show their fields read-only.
Comfort
- Invert colors for reading at night (pages only).
- Light, Dark or system theme: View ▸ Theme.
- Full screen with F11 (⌃⌘F on a Mac).
- On a Mac: the toolbar in the title bar, a translucent sidebar, your accent color and the macOS menu bar.
- On Windows: native menus with keyboard access (Alt), and your recent files when you right-click Leafrune on the taskbar.
Open it with the chat button in the toolbar, ⌘/ on a Mac, Ctrl+/ on Windows, or View ▸ Assistant.
- Ask in your own words. The assistant finds the passages that answer your question and writes a short answer from them.
- Every answer cites its pages. Click a page link and Leafrune jumps there and highlights the passage.
- It also knows the whole document. "What is this about?" gets an overview; "How many pages?" and "What does page 12 say?" work too.
- It says when it does not know. If the document does not cover your question, it tells you instead of guessing.
- It shows what it is doing: loading the model, searching, reading passages.
- Each document keeps its own conversation. Copy an answer with the copy button; clear the conversation with the trash button.
- It reads filled-in forms (Mac, 0.9.5). Ask "What did I put as my last name?" or "What's still empty?"; the answer links to the field. It sees the values you have saved, so save (⌘S) after filling in.
When you open a PDF for the first time, Leafrune reads its text in the background (a long book takes a minute or two). You can keep reading meanwhile; the next time, the assistant is ready at once.
The assistant uses a small AI model so it can run on an ordinary laptop. Its answers can be incomplete or wrong. Check the cited pages before you rely on an answer.
The table lists the Windows shortcuts. On a Mac, most use ⌘ instead of Ctrl, and the menus show every shortcut.
| Action | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| Open a PDF | Ctrl+O |
| Reload / close the document | Ctrl+R / Ctrl+W |
| Find | Ctrl+F |
| Next / previous match | Ctrl+G / Ctrl+Shift+G, or F3 / Shift+F3 |
| Go to page | Ctrl+L |
| Next / previous page | N / P |
| First / last page | Ctrl+Home / Ctrl+End |
| Back / forward | Alt+← / Alt+→ |
| Zoom in / out / automatic | Ctrl+= / Ctrl+- / Ctrl+0 |
| Fit page / fit width / automatic | F / W / A |
| Rotate left / right | Ctrl+← / Ctrl+→ |
| Sidebar | F9 |
| Invert colors | Ctrl+I |
| Assistant | Ctrl+/ |
| Full screen | F11 |
| macOS | Windows | |
|---|---|---|
| System | Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later) | Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit (x64) with AVX2 |
| Disk | about 3.5 GB free (app and AI models) | about 1 GB free (app and AI models) |
| Memory | 8 GB recommended | 8 GB recommended |
- Reading needs no more than an ordinary PDF viewer.
- While the assistant answers, Leafrune uses more memory (about 2 GB on a Mac, 1 GB on Windows); it frees it again two minutes after your last question.
- On a Mac the assistant runs on the built-in graphics processor; on Windows it runs on the processor (no graphics card needed).
- Everything happens on your computer: reading, searching, and the assistant's answers.
- The only network use is the one-time AI model download from Hugging Face.
- No telemetry, analytics, crash reports, accounts or ads.
- Your PDFs are never copied or modified.
Details, and how to delete everything Leafrune stores, are in PRIVACY.md.
- Scanned PDFs (pages that are only images) can be read, but the assistant cannot answer questions about them: there is no text recognition (OCR) yet.
- The assistant works best in English. Its search model was trained mainly on English text.
- Printing is not available yet.
- Forms: on Windows (0.9.3) you can type into form fields, but the values are not saved yet. On a Mac, forms that run their own scripts (calculated totals, checks) are filled in without them, signature fields are not supported, and XFA forms can only be viewed.
- No annotations (highlights, notes) yet.
- Mac: Intel Macs are not supported yet. The beta is tested on macOS 27.
- Linux is not supported in the beta.
Leafrune is in beta, and your reports shape it.
- Something broken? Open an issue with your macOS or Windows version, the Leafrune version (Leafrune ▸ About Leafrune on a Mac, Help ▸ About Leafrune on Windows) and the steps to see it.
- A wrong or odd answer? Report it with the question, the answer and the page it should have used.
- Ideas are welcome as issues too.
Issues are public. Do not attach confidential PDFs or paste private text; a public-domain or self-made PDF that shows the problem is ideal.
Security problems: please follow SECURITY.md instead of opening an issue.
- Mac: quit Leafrune, then drag it from your Applications folder to the Trash.
- Windows: Settings ▸ Apps ▸ Installed apps ▸ Leafrune ▸ Uninstall.
To also remove your recent files, reading positions, conversations and the AI models, delete Leafrune's data folder as described in PRIVACY.md.
Leafrune is free to use on any number of your own devices, for personal and professional use. The beta is closed source; the source code is planned to be published under an open-source license with version 2.0. See LICENSE.md.
Leafrune is built on open-source software and openly licensed AI models: Gemma 4 E2B by Google DeepMind (Mac, 0.9.5), Qwen3-0.6B by the Qwen team, Alibaba Cloud (Windows, 0.9.3), and snowflake-arctic-embed-s by Snowflake (both). Thank you to their authors. Credits and licenses: THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md and THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.txt (for the current version), also in the app under Help ▸ Open-Source Software.