HtkPDF on iPhone and iPad

HtkPDF also runs on iPhone and iPad. It is the same application: the same tools, the same settings, the same files — only the layout changes, because a phone screen is not a Mac screen.

One purchase

The iOS version carries the same identifier as the macOS one. Apple calls this a universal purchase: bought once, HtkPDF is available on your Mac, your iPhone and your iPad, with no second payment. And there is a single application for phone and tablet, not two to install.

Every tool, no exceptions

No tool is Mac-only. Merge, split, extract, watermarks, Bates numbering, redaction, protection, compression, conversion to Word or to images, comparison, statistics — the Dashboard shows the same categories and the same modules as anywhere else. Batch processing is there too, as are the history and Reading mode.

What differs belongs to the device, not to the application:

• Saving goes through the system picker. There is no default save folder to configure in Settings: you choose the location for each export, in Files.
• Scanning uses the device's own camera. Where the Mac borrows an iPhone's camera through Continuity Camera, the iPhone and the iPad scan directly: several pages, one PDF. See Continuity Camera.
• The "Draw with" setting appears on iPad only, since the Apple Pencil is its own.

On iPad: sidebar and tool bar side by side

On an iPad, the layout is the Mac's. The sidebar stays on the left, the document preview takes the centre, and the selected tool's bar sits on the right: its settings, its navigation block and its footer — Cancel on the left, the gradient action on the right.

The preview shows the result live: the watermark appears on the pages before you apply anything at all.

On iPhone: a tab bar, and the tool bar below

On a phone, the sidebar becomes a tab bar at the bottom of the screen, with five entries: Home, Open, Process, Recents and Batch. Help and Settings open as sheets from the bottom of the home screen.

When you open a tool, its bar moves below the preview instead of beside it: the document on top, the settings underneath, the action at the bottom. The navigation block (page number, zoom, arrows) disappears — by touch it is redundant: you page and pinch the document directly.

The tool's header is deliberately small there, and the settings sections start collapsed, apart from Instructions: you open the one you need instead of scrolling past the ones you don't. A section that carries the result of an action opens on its own — the report from Remove blank pages appears as soon as the analysis is done. On Mac and iPad, where the bar is tall, everything stays expanded.

The Process screen scrolls as one piece: the document card slides away as you move down to the modules, which then get the full height of the screen.

Gestures

• One finger draws, when a drawing or measuring tool is open.
• Two fingers always scroll, even mid-stroke.
• A tap selects an annotation; its handles let you move or resize it.
• With a keyboard, Delete erases the selected annotation and Esc deselects it.
• In the thumbnail pane, drag a page to reorder it.

Apple Pencil (iPad)

A finger resting on the page while you scroll leaves a stroke. Settings therefore offer Draw with, with three values:

This setting only concerns the Drawing and Measure tools, the two gestures that leave a mark. A finger always keeps the right to grab and move an annotation: without that, an iPad with no pencil would become unusable the moment the Drawing tool opened.

Opening a document

Three routes:

1. The document picker — from the Open tab, choose a PDF in Files, on the device or in iCloud Drive.
2. From Files — Share ▸ HtkPDF on a PDF opens it directly.
3. The app's folder — PDFs dropped into the HtkPDF folder in the Files app are picked up on the next launch.

Documents you open join the Recents list, and reopening one resumes the working copy where you left it.

Large text sizes

The application follows the text size chosen in Settings ▸ Display & Brightness ▸ Text Size, including the accessibility sizes. At the largest ones the layout rearranges itself: the home screen's quick actions move to a single column, and the screen scrolls as one piece rather than holding on to a header that has grown too tall. See Accessibility.