PDF Owl

Open any PDF and PDF Owl will scan each page using computer vision, detect headings, and build a full outline automatically. The generated table of contents is saved inside the file, so it works in other PDF apps too — not just PDF Owl. No manual work, no copying and pasting, no cloud upload.

Select text and highlight it in any color. Add a note to the highlight, or drop a free-text comment anywhere on the page with your choice of font size and color. All your annotations are collected in one view as cutouts from the actual pages — easy to browse at a glance.

Type what you're looking for and navigate results in a clean, Safari-style interface. Need more control? Search only annotated pages, narrow results to specific outline sections, or use regular expressions (RegEx) for precise pattern matching.

Merge files, split them apart, reorder pages, duplicate or delete them — all from a bird's-eye pages view with the outline visible on the side. It's the only way to organize a large PDF without losing track of where you are.

Fine-tune the AI-generated outline or build your own from scratch. Select text on the page, hit "Add Outline," and it's in. Rename, reorder, or delete items anytime using keyboard shortcuts or the editor panel.

PDF Owl runs entirely on your device inside the macOS sandbox — nothing is uploaded anywhere. At the same time, it plays nicely with cloud-synced files: if you edit a document on another device, PDF Owl reloads it seamlessly without losing your reading position.