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Comment by NightPageReader

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Comment by NightPageReader

Hi HN, I made Lampka, a PDF reader for Windows aimed at long documents: papers, theses, reports.

The free and even paid alternatives I tried never fully met my needs. All I ever wanted was a reader that helps me work with long documents:

1. configurable colour and brightness themes,

2. saving the progress of my sessions, even read-aloud sessions,

3. bookmarks, highlights and notes that are easy to export,

4. all of it easy to configure through a friendly UI,

5. and, not a technical one, friendly and responsive support that listens to feedback.

As I couldn't find anything on the market that did this, I decided to build it myself.

The part I'm most pleased with is the dark mode. Most PDF readers invert the whole page, which turns photos and charts into negatives. Lampka renders the page twice with PDFium. In the second copy it strips out everything except images and vividly coloured shapes, which gives a pixel mask of what the pictures paint. Everything outside that mask is recoloured by brightness, so paper becomes the theme's background and ink becomes the text colour. The pictures stay in their original colours. Full-page scans are recoloured like text, so scanned books still go dark, and pages that are designed light-on-dark are left alone.

Other things it does:

- Hover a citation or figure reference to preview where it goes; click, and Back brings you home.

- Split view of the same document.

- Read aloud with Windows' own voices, offline, following sentence by sentence.

- A reading ruler.

- It remembers your place by the file's contents, so renaming or moving a PDF doesn't lose it.

It works offline and doesn't need an account, so your documents stay on your computer. It never changes your PDFs.

It's built in Python with PySide6 (Qt), and PDFium through pypdfium2 does the rendering. It's compiled with Nuitka and code-signed.

Everything is free during the beta, with no sign-up. After the beta, reading stays free and the study tools (previews, split view, read aloud, highlights) become a one-time £29. There's a £15 founder's licence until 1.0. Windows 10/11 only for now; a Mac build exists but isn't released yet.

I plan to keep developing it for a long time, so feedback really shapes what comes next. I'd love to hear where it breaks on your PDFs, which features you'd want, and what would make you switch from what you use now.

Replies NightPageReader · 3h
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