CaseLeaf

CaseLeaf is a PDF reader and marker for the Mac, built for documents where a mistake costs something: contracts, disclosure bundles, drawings, scanned files, anything that goes out under your name.

It does three things an ordinary PDF reader does not.

A mark is a mark until you say otherwise. Highlights, notes, shapes, signatures and black-outs all sit on top of the page and can be moved, recoloured, undone and deleted. Nothing becomes part of the paper until you make it permanent, and that is a separate, deliberate act that writes a new file and leaves the original alone.

A black-out removes; it does not cover. In most applications a black rectangle over a passage hides it from the eye and leaves the words in the file for anyone who selects, searches or scripts them. Here the rectangle is a declaration, and Black Out Permanently takes the words out of the file.

The document carries its own record. History, bookmarks, snapshots, a sheet's scale, the conversation of a review: all of it is written into the PDF itself, in standard fields where PDF has them, so the file you send is the file with the trail in it. There is no database on this machine holding any of it.

Everything you can do from the menus you can also do from a terminal or from AppleScript, on files the application never opens: sixty-seven commands, each with a page of its own.

Overview

Follow these sections to dive into the different areas of CaseLeaf

• Where to Start gives you an overview of the fundamental areas of the application
• Getting Around goes more in detail about how to navigate the application
• Marking shows you how to markup your documents
• Blacking Out explains how to permanently remove parts of a document
• Forms dives into how to create forms
• Scripting shows how to use the application from the command line or from AppleScript

Watch: a short video for this page is still to come.

Download the handbook as a zip