EmiFyn

Features

What it does today.

Everything on this page is built and working. What isn’t built is further down the page, in the same detail, because a feature list with no gaps in it is just an advert.

The point

Editing text

The reason I built it. Everything else on this page you can get free somewhere else.

  • Edit a paragraph where it sits. Double-click it, or press the key. The editor opens at the same size and in the same place as the paragraph.F2
  • It talks to you while you type — which font it’s using, how many lines you’re now up to, and whether you’ve run out of room.
  • Keep it or throw it away. Undo puts the page back exactly as it was.CtrlEnterEsc
  • Your alignment survives, justified text included.
  • The document’s own font first. Then the same font from your PC. Then the nearest thing it can find, and it says which one it went with.
  • Edited words stay searchable and you can still copy them out.
  • It works on stamped and assembled documents too, not only on text sitting directly on the page.
  • It shows you what it can and can’t touch. A box round every paragraph, red where it would have to refuse.CtrlB

Everyday

Reading and getting around

Where you’ll spend most of your time.

  • One long scroll, with pages drawn in the background so nothing stops to think.
  • Zoom to fit the width, fit the page, or actual size. Or zoom straight at your cursor with the wheel.Ctrlscroll
  • Thumbnails and bookmarks down the side, and both stay quick on a long document.
  • Select text across pages, double-click to grab a whole paragraph, copy as normal.
  • Search the whole document, with a list of hits and next and previous.
  • Several files open at once. Each tab remembers its own zoom and where you’d got to. Drag them around, and a dot shows you which ones aren’t saved.CtrlTabCtrlW
  • Printing, with a preview, fitted to whatever your printer can actually reach. It tells you what scale it used, in case you’re checking a form against a ruler.CtrlP
  • Drag files in from Explorer, whether or not something’s already open.
  • Dark and light themes, a recent files list, and a window that opens where you left it.

Structure

Pages

Shuffling, splitting and stitching. All of it undoable, none of it touching your original.

  • Rotate, delete, duplicate, reorder and crop pages.
  • Add blank pages, sized to match their neighbours unless you say otherwise. Or bring pages in from another file.
  • Merge, split and extract. Split every so many pages, or wherever a bookmark falls. Pull a range out into its own file.
  • A pages panel where you can select several at once, drag them into a new order, and right-click for the rest.
  • Page ranges in the syntax you already know — 1-5, 8, 12-, all, odd, even.

Stamps

Watermarks and numbering

Added as real text, not as pictures of text.

  • Watermarks, text or image, angled, see-through, in front of the page or behind it.
  • Headers, footers and page numbers.
  • Bates numbering for a set of documents.
  • All of it stays selectable and searchable, because it’s put on the page the same way an edit is.

Pictures

Images

The ones already in the file, and new ones.

  • Click a picture to select it. Green handles mean it’s a picture rather than something you’ve drawn on.
  • Move it and resize it. A corner keeps it in proportion, hold Shift to stretch it out of shape, side handles pull one way only.Shift
  • Drop in a PNG or JPEG. It arrives already selected and keeps its own proportions, so nothing ends up squashed.
  • Moving one copy leaves the others alone, even when the same picture appears on several pages.
  • Delete stops it being drawn. The status bar is honest that this doesn’t scrub it out of the file, and points you at redaction if that’s what you meant.Del

Markup

Notes and marks

Twelve kinds, all still editable after you’ve put them down.

  • Highlight, underline, strike through and squiggle over text you’ve selected.
  • Sticky notes, text boxes, rectangles, ellipses, lines, arrows, freehand ink and stamps.
  • Move and resize anything afterwards. Eight handles, drag the middle to shift it, and lines and arrows get a handle on each end.Del
  • A formatting bar that changes with what you’ve picked: outline, fill, thickness and opacity for shapes; colour, font, size, bold, italic and alignment for text. Restyle what’s selected, or set up how the next one will look.
  • It remembers your colours, so your next highlight matches your last one.
  • A panel listing every mark with its page and a short summary.
  • Text boxes are typed on the page itself, using the same editor as a paragraph.
  • Flattening keeps things sharp. A flattened text box is still text, not a photograph of text.

Removal

Redaction

Where “looks gone” and “is gone” are very different things.

  • Marking and applying are separate. Anything waiting shows up in the panel in red, labelled as pending.
  • The confirmation tells you what’s about to happen: how many areas, across how many pages, that the content goes rather than gets covered, and that saving makes it permanent.
  • It really does delete. The words are gone from the page and from the file underneath it. Undo still works while you’ve got the document open.
  • Text either side on the same line is left alone, and no redaction marks survive into the saved file.

Files

Passwords and file size

Locking, unlocking, squashing down and putting broken files back together.

  • Password protection using AES-256 by default. The older options are there, and clearly labelled as weak.
  • Eight permission settings, described the way the PDF specification describes them rather than in invented words.
  • Unlocking lists what it’s about to remove, and explains why it’s able to.
  • “Protected” and “restricted” aren’t the same thing, and Emifyn says which one you’re looking at. A file that opens for anyone but claims you can’t print it is a very different animal from an encrypted one.
  • Compression shows its working. First where the weight actually is — pictures, fonts, page content — then three options, each one really built so the size next to it is the size you’d get. Always saved as a new file.
  • Repair works on the file directly, so it can get at documents that won’t open. It never writes over your original, and it tells you how many pages came back rather than just declaring success.
  • Fast web view for files that’ll be served over the internet.

Diff

Comparing two files

For the version that came back from the other side with changes in it.

  • Side by side, scrolling together, with the pages lined up by what’s on them rather than by number.
  • Differences down to the word, plus a picture comparison, boxed on both sides.
  • A list of the changes that jumps both views to the same spot.

Safety

Not losing your work

The bits you only notice when they’re missing.

  • Your original isn’t touched until you save it. Everything happens on a copy, and saving leaves a .bak behind.
  • One undo history for the lot. A word you changed before deleting a page can still be undone afterwards.
  • One action, one undo. Nudge a shape ten times and it’s still exactly the size it started.
  • An About box you can copy. Version, engine versions, your platform, all onto the clipboard in one go for a bug report.
  • Update checks that don’t fib. “Couldn’t reach the server” never gets reported as “you’re up to date”.

The other half

What it doesn’t do yet.

Better you know now than after you’ve installed it.

Not built

  • No  Converting to and from Word, Excel and PowerPoint
  • No  Converting to and from images, or turning a web page into a PDF
  • No  OCR, so scans stay pictures for now
  • No  Filling in or building interactive forms
  • No  Digital signatures
  • No  Running jobs across a whole folder at once

There, but with rough edges

  • Your text is rewrapped inside the box it came from. Write something longer and you’ll get a warning, not a page that reflows underneath.
  • One paragraph at a time. No selecting several, and no find-and-replace across the document.
  • Some paragraphs are off limits, on purpose, and you’re told why. Text that’s been turned into outlines has no font left in it and genuinely can’t be edited by anyone.
  • Scanned pages are photographs. Without OCR there’s no text to get hold of. You can cover and retype, but the program won’t pretend it’s doing more than that.
  • Pictures can’t be rotated or cropped, and you can’t swap a new photo into an existing spot.
  • Compressing won’t work on a locked file, and it explains why: the passwords aren’t the program’s to hand back out.

Next

What I’m building next, in this order.

No dates. It’s one person and evenings, and a date would just be a guess with a tie on.

  1. Converting, and OCR. To and from Word, Excel and PowerPoint. To and from images. Web pages into PDFs. And OCR, so a scan becomes something you can search, and eventually something you can edit.

  2. Forms and signatures. Filling forms in and building them, getting the data in and out, and checking and adding digital signatures.

  3. Batch jobs. Running any of the above over a whole folder. The pieces are already shaped for it; what’s missing is the thing that drives them.

One thing that would really help

Every test Emifyn has ever passed uses documents I made specifically to trip it up. What it’s never seen is a real file from the wild that misbehaves: a battered scan, an ancient locked form, something a printer produced in 2004 that no reader has been happy with since. If you’ve got a PDF that Emifyn handles badly, sending it to me is worth more than anything else you could do.

How to send one

Fancy a go?

It’s free, it installs without asking for an administrator password, and it uninstalls cleanly if you don’t get on with it.

Download for Windows