Favorite PDF tools on macOS in 2025
It is almost the end of the 2025. I got unlucky with chalazion on both eyes after hitting a gym that I guess isn’t very well maintained and cleaned after all.
Ever since, I have been very sensitive with my eyes and trying not to put them through too much pressure. I also started noticing that no matter what kind of light settings I choose on the PocketBook reader app on the Android tablet, after a few hours of use, I start to feel the eye strain.
So to cope, I started searching for tools that would:
- Allow me to invert PDF books into black background with white text, while keeping images untouched (not inverted). This is in order to have better experience while reading on both tablet and Mac.
- Replace not so flexible reader layouts on macOS Preview (default app for PDFs on macOS) and allow me to use more screen when reading on large monitors (27” up to 34”)
- Ideally - they are FOSS
I was not very positive at first that such tools will exist in FOSS for macOS, but I was quite wrong.
After some digging and crawling through some blog posts, I decided to give these two a try:
- Skim - a PDF reader and note-taker for OS X (macOS)
- Stirling PDF - actively developed open-source web-based PDF editor that cares about privacy and security
✎About Skim
It is great! Very lightweight, installable through Homebrew and best of all, it has this “Horizontal Continuous” reader mode that I couldn’t be happier with.
Depending on the book, it allows me to load up to 3 full pages of the book in the horizontal plane with enough zoom to not get eye strain on 27” monitor. The best part is the ease of scrolling horizontally which for me at least makes it harder to forget about the context when moving pages.
For most books however, 2 pages loaded in this reading mode are the most comfortable setup.
Image below shows an example.
And the best of all is that this Horizontal Continuous reading mode can be used in full screen (image below).
✎About Stirling PDF
Stirling helps you read and edit PDFs privately. For “home users”, or people who need to edit PDFs only every few weeks, it offers Free tier, with self-hosted web-app. It also offers binary bundles in the form of desktop application for all platforms (macOS, Linux and Windows), but those seem to be outdated and considered legacy in terms of features. It seems that development team is giving highest priority to the web-app at the moment.
I chose to start with “Server Deployments” option but on macOS, using Docker.
I simply followed “Docker Guide” and I was up and running in few minutes.
Here is a snapshot of the main page UI.
Of course, the first tool that I tried to invert the color of few books was “Replace-Invert Color PDF”, and I couldn’t be happier.
The size of those inverted PDFs isn’t small to be honest, but given that I read at most 2-3 books at any point in time, all of my devices can handle it.
However, even for the problem of size of PDFs, Stirling-PDF offers another great little tool in it’s toolbelt - “Compress PDF”.
All in all, I think I have found a good alternative to Adobe Acrobat PRO that offers plethora of tools with safety and privacy not being neglected.
Until next time!
