PDF Inspector

PDF Inspector is a powerful diagnostic tool for reading and analyzing PDF files. It displays a PDF’s objects as a tree and allows you to view, edit, delete, and update arbitrary PDF objects. These are the main features:

FEATURES

• Explore PDF documents as object trees

• Use a quick access sidebar for pages

• Quick-jump to the PDF object ID

• Render content streams (pages, annotations) as images

• Add and remove PDF objects — like Number, String, Name, Boolean, Reference, Dictionary, and Stream — on the fly

• Read and edit content streams in text or hex format

• Transparently decompress content streams

• Supports password-protected documents

BUILT FOR CONVENIENCE

We built PDF Inspector to debug and understand PDF documents and to improve the PSPDFKit SDK. It’s an advanced diagnostic tool that can help you understand why a file is corrupted or even fix issues in files. Because it’s built on the strong foundation of PSPDFKit for macOS, it should be able to open any PDF you throw at it.

PDF SYNTAX 101

A PDF consists of objects that can have varying types (see PDF Syntax 101). So you can simply open a PDF in your favorite text editor and read it, however, editing the file will likely corrupt the document, as PDFs are really binary documents. Content streams define how a page, an annotation, or a form is rendered. They are usually compressed and nested within thousands of other objects. For efficient browsing, it makes sense to present the objects in a tree. This is exactly how we built PDF Inspector.

TRUSTED BY COMPANIES YOU KNOW

PDF Inspector is built on top of and powered by PSPDFKit, the same PDF engine trusted around the world by companies like Dropbox, Box, IBM, Atlassian, SAP, and Lufthansa.