Interface

Everything in vivePDF starts from one bar along the top of the window. The Home, Viewer, Pages and Studio buttons on the left switch between workspaces, and the Tools and Help menus hold the rest. The documents you open sit in tabs, which you can group or move into separate windows.

The top bar

The vivePDF logo and the four workspaces sit on the left of the bar:

• Home: recent documents, collections and quick tools. Customize home lets you rearrange its sections.
• Viewer: where you read, search and mark up documents. See Open and read a PDF.
• Pages: the page organizer, showing every page of the open document as a thumbnail. See Organise pages.
• Studio: an editor for writing a document or making a design from a blank page.

On the right you will find the search box that opens the command palette, the theme button (it switches between light and dark), the Language menu, Settings (the gear icon) and the Open PDF button. When a new version is ready, a green update button appears to the left of the search box.

As the window gets narrower the bar compacts itself: labels go first, then the menus turn into icons, so search, settings and Open PDF stay visible at any width.

The Tools menu

Click Tools and the tools open in six groups:

• Page layout: Merge, Split, Rename
• Optimisation: Compress, OCR, Scans, Compare, Accessibility, Print check, PDF/A archive, Batch, Watched folders
• To PDF: Create PDF
• From PDF: Convert
• Content editing: Edit, QR & barcodes, Answer sheets, Forms
• Security: Security, Sign

Show all at the bottom of the menu opens the catalogue of every tool with a search box; tools that have no line of their own in the menu, such as rotating pages or adding a watermark, are listed there. Search in folders searches the text of every PDF in the folders you have indexed and jumps straight to the page. The full list is on the Tools page.

The command palette

Press Ctrl+K, or click the Search tools, pages or documents box in the top bar, to open the command palette. Type the name of a tool, a settings section or an open document, pick it with the arrow keys and press Enter.

Start your search with a symbol to narrow the palette to one kind of result:

• > shows only actions, such as New window, PDF from clipboard or Check for updates.
• / searches pages and settings sections.
• @ searches open documents and recent files.
• # followed by a number goes to that page of the open document.

The Help menu

The Help menu holds Help topics, Keyboard shortcuts (F1), What’s new and Privacy. Below them come Report a bug, Suggest a feature, Open log folder and Save support bundle…, and at the bottom Check for updates and About.

Tabs and tab groups

Every document you open gets its own tab above the Viewer; the same tabs also appear in Pages. Drag a tab to change its place, or move it with Ctrl+Shift+←/→. Ctrl+W closes the active document.

Right-click a tab for options such as Close others, Close all, Copy path, Copy file name, Show in folder and Open beside current document. Add to new group in the same menu groups tabs the way a web browser does:

• Click the name chip in front of a group to collapse or expand it, double-click it to rename the group, and drag it to move the whole group.
• The group menu offers Colour (13 colours), Ungroup, Close the group’s documents, Open a document in this group and Save as collection.
• A group saved as a collection appears under Collections on Home, where you can later reopen all its files as one tab group.

Windows

Ctrl+Shift+N opens an empty new window. To give a document a window of its own, drag its tab out of the window and let go, or choose Move to new window from the tab menu; Move group to new window in the group menu moves all of the group’s documents to a new window. A document with unsaved changes stays in its window until you save it. Settings, theme, language and recent files are shared by every window.

Side panels in the Viewer

In the Viewer, a vertical strip of buttons runs down each side of the page.

The Navigation strip on the left opens the Thumbnails, Outline and Attachments panels. A Signatures button appears when the document is signed, and Layers when it has layers.

The Tools strip on the right starts with Comments, Annotate / mark up, Edit and Presentation tools. Then come Reading mode, Read aloud, Page colours and Document info. At the bottom of the strip are the page number box, Rotate, the Page display menu and the zoom buttons.

Each button opens and closes its own panel. You can choose which panels are ready when a document opens in Settings › Viewer; for the other settings see Settings and privacy.