PDF Inspector PDF Readers app for Android description
PDF Inspector opens a PDF and shows what is actually inside it. Like a browsers developer tools, it parses each pages content stream into a navigable tree of elements (text blocks, vector paths and images) so you can find any single element, select it on the page or in the tree, and edit it. Edits go to a saved copy; your original file is never touched.
Highlights:
- DevTools-style element tree: every page is parsed into a structured tree of text, path and image nodes, grouped the way the PDF draws them. Switch between friendly labels and the raw content-stream operators.
- Two-way selection: tap an element on the page or tap its row in the tree, and the other side highlights to match, with a clear bordered outline on the canvas.
- Edit in place: move and resize an element, recolor its fill or stroke (entered as hex, with the elements color space shown), and retype text. When the original font lacks a character, re-encode the line with a fallback font, bundled or taken from your device or imported. Changes are written straight back into the content stream, with full undo and redo.
- Surgical delete: remove exactly the element you picked by rewriting just its part of the content stream, leaving the rest of the page untouched.
- Save a copy: write your edited PDF to a new file through the system file picker; the source document is left unchanged.
- Smooth viewing: pan and pinch-zoom, fit to width or height, a global zoom that carries across pages, and a full-screen mode.
- Dockable inspector: the inspector panel docks to the side in landscape or the bottom in portrait, can be resized, and can be made transparent to see the page through it.
- Material You: Material 3 design with dynamic color on Android 12+, light / dark / system themes and a choice of accent colors.
Private and open:
- Open source, no accounts, no telemetry.
- No network access and no storage permission: files are opened and saved through Androids Storage Access Framework, so the app only ever touches the documents you explicitly pick.
PDF Inspector works with the drawing primitives a PDF already contains: select, move, resize, recolor, retype and delete them. It is not a word-processor-style text editor, so lines do not reflow, but when the original font is missing a character you can re-encode the text with a fallback font, bundled or taken from your device or imported.
