What it does
| View | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Reader | The document rebuilt as HTML — from the author's own structure tags where the PDF has them, and from inferred structure where it does not. |
| Original | The original PDF pages, which work even when no text can be extracted. |
| Markdown | Copyable text: either what the Reader shows, or the parser's raw output. |
Normally you open a PDF and press the toolbar button. Switching
Opening PDFs to the Reader in the settings makes addresses
ending in .pdf open here directly instead; the browser asks for
access at the moment you switch it on, and gets it back when you switch it off.
The principle
It does not assert what cannot be confirmed by looking. An image with no description is reported as having none. Machine-read text is labelled as machine-read every time it is read. When a page yields no text, the extension finds out whether it is an image, text drawn as outlines, or genuinely empty — and says which.
| Source | How it is shown |
|---|---|
| Written by the author | Shown as written |
| Generated by the authoring tool | Labelled as automatically generated |
| Generated by this extension | Labelled as an AI-generated description |
| Missing | Reported as missing |
Privacy
PDFs are parsed inside the browser. In ordinary use no document is sent to any server. The optional image descriptions and OCR use the browser's own on-device model, which runs on your machine.
It asks for five permissions at install and none of them is a host permission: installing it grants access to no site. One optional host permission exists, asked for only when you switch Opening PDFs to the Reader, and handed back when you switch it away.
Getting it
Not published yet. Listings are being prepared for the Chrome Web Store and for Firefox's add-on site, and the links will appear here once they are live. Until then it can be loaded from source. Chrome and Firefox are both supported (Manifest V3) — though image descriptions and OCR use Chrome's built-in AI and are available there only.