I am so happy to announce MJ PDF v3.0.0. This is not only a release, it is a rewrite of nearly every corner of the app, and the point where MJ PDF stops being a fork.

What ships today is its own codebase, with its own reader libraries and its own PDF engine build. And I am proud to say that nearly all user requests have been fulfilled.

• MJ PDF v2: ~260 files, ~30K lines of code
• MJ PDF v3: ~570 files, ~80K lines of code

Through all of it, MJ PDF stays what it has always been:

• Small (8.5 MB)
• Fast (actually faster)
• Simple to use
• Private, and free of ads or tracking.

Quick Links#

• Best way to get it? Droid-ify store.
• Want a direct APK link? Here it is.
• Love screenshots? Check the MJ PDF Gallery.
• v3.0.0 full changelog (650 entries.)

Home#

A New Home Screen#

MJ PDF used to open with a file picker. Now it opens to a real library.

The Recent tab

• Three swipeable tabs: Recent, Library, and Folders. The selected tab is remembered.
• A Continue Reading pager and a detailed reading history list.
• Search from Home finds every PDF on your device, not just the ones you opened.
• Home shows each document’s real title instead of its filename.

If you liked the old behavior, the Home screen can be turned off entirely, and opening a PDF from another app still goes straight to the reader.

Your Library, Organized#

The Library tab

• Reading statuses: to-read, reading, on-hold, completed, and abandoned.
• First-page covers in a grid or a list, with adjustable density and sorting.
• Reading progress on every cover, as a ring with the percentage or a thin bar. You pick in the settings.
• Every card has an options dialog to see: full PDF properties, progress, status picker, rename on disk, and delete from device.
• Hide a book from the library, or remove it from Recents.

Documents are identified by their content, so progress and statuses survive moving, renaming, and re-downloading files. A moved file heals silently when the scanner finds it again.

Folders and Scanning#

The Folders tab	Choosing scan locations

• The Folders tab browses every PDF on the device by folder.
• Supports hierarchy mode and flat mode.
• The library fills near-instantly on a fresh install using the system media index, and a background scan catches the rest.
• Customize what folders to get scanned in the Library tab (Folders tab shows everything).

Annotation#

Text Selection and Highlighting#

Live inline text selection, finally.

Selecting and highlighting text	My Highlights

• A floating card with six highlight colors on top and Copy, Share, Web, Note, Translate, and Delete actions below.
• Highlights are saved into the PDF itself, so they show up in any other reader.
• Highlights that already exist in the document are detected, selectable, and editable.
• A My Highlights page lists every highlight in the document, with search, date sorting, a color filter, and plain text export.
• Unsaved work survives rotation, restarts, and even crashes through autosave recovery.

Notes#

Adding a note	My Notes

• Attach a note to any highlight. Notes are stored inside the PDF, with creation and modification dates.
• A note on plain text creates a gray highlight, so notes work without coloring the page.
• A My Notes page lists every note in the document.

Share Quotes as Images#

One of my favorite features in this release.

A quote, ready to share

• Turn any selected text into a clean square image with the book’s name and author.
• Customize it however you like! (you can remove the “Made by MJ PDF”)

Translate and Define#

The offline dictionary	Translation settings

• Translate selected text with your installed translation apps or through web translators.
• Supports 5 web translators and you can add your custom one.
• For single words, you can install an optional offline dictionary (about 7 MB, built from WordNet) and get definitions with no network at all.

Handwritten Signatures#

Drawing a signature	Placing it on the page

• Draw a signature once, then place, move, and resize it on any page.
• Stored as vector strokes, so it stays sharp at any zoom.
• Saved into the PDF as page content, so every reader displays it.
• The app remembers your signature for the next document.

PDF Forms#

Filling a form

• Fill PDF form fields directly in the reader.
• A tap tolerance makes small checkboxes easy to hit, and edits no longer reload the page.

Reading#

The Reader Menu and Configurable Controls#

The redesigned menu	Configuring the buttons

• A simple reader menu that exposes most Actions and Pages.
• You can very freely configure and re-order options in:
  • The toolbar
  • The shortcut bar
  • The fullscreen buttons.

Hide Margins#

Before	After

• Hide Margins detects blank page margins and crops them away, so the text fills your screen.
• Detection runs in the background with a cancelable progress card, and results are cached per PDF.
• Per-page overrides, a global always-hide option, and your reading position survives the switch.
• The file itself is never changed.

Fun fact: This is the feature that I personally wanted the most and what prompted the whole v3.0.0 work.

Dual Page Mode#

Two pages, like a book

• Dual Page Mode pairs pages side by side like an open book.
• An optional First Page Alone setting keeps the cover on its own, so spreads line up like print.

Right-to-Left Reading#

The reading direction override

• Right-to-left reading in horizontal mode, for Arabic books, and anything else that flows the other way.
• The direction is detected automatically per document, with a per-document override.

A Rebuilt Text Mode#

Text Mode turns any PDF into something that reads like an e-book, and in v3 it was rebuilt from scratch.

Text Mode

• Reflow tries to rebuild real paragraphs instead of raw hard-wrapped lines.
• Headings are detected by size and weight, lists keep their lines, and poetry is left alone.
• Hyphenated line breaks are joined correctly, and right-to-left pages reflow with direction-aware rules.
• Text Mode settings let you choose from multiple fonts, themes, text sizes, and a readable line length option.

Search and Navigation#

Faster, Smarter Search#

Search results in the reader

• Results stream in live while the document is being scanned, instead of appearing at the end.
• Step through matches from inside the reader with previous and next arrows and a live counter.
• Picking a result centers the view on the match, with an optional zoom.
• Search sessions are cached, so repeating a search is near instant, and the list remembers its position.
• Added an option to ignore letter accents while searching.

Go To Page and All Pages#

The Go To Page dialog	All pages at a glance

• Go To Page shows page thumbnails, not just a number field.
• An All Pages view lays out the whole document as a customizable grid for fast visual jumps.

Table of Contents and Links#

The Table of Contents

• Search inside the Table of Contents, matching titles and page numbers.
• Added expand all entries, collapse all entries, and locate the current entry buttons.
• The path to your current chapter is highlighted.
• Jumping from the contents shows a snackbar to jump right back.
• Huge tables of contents scroll smoothly now.

Bookmarks and Navigation History#

My Bookmarks	Back and forward, like a browser

• Bookmark any page and give it your own name.
• Every bookmark shows the chapter it belongs to, pulled from the table of contents.
• Jumping through an internal link offers a jump back that restores the exact view you left.
• Browser-like history for everything that moves you around: links, bookmarks, contents, search, and go-to jumps.
• Long reading stops are recorded automatically in the navigation history.

Privacy#

Incognito and History Controls#

Incognito in the reader	The History and Privacy page

• A dedicated History and Privacy settings page with a global switch that stops all reading history writes.
• A Reading History screen listing every remembered document, including hidden ones, with per-item delete.
• A strict per-session incognito mode: no history, no positions, no passwords, etc.
• The app theme turns into a special dark color with an incognito icon while it is active.

Backup and Restore#

Backup settings

• Export and import your settings, reading history, and app data.
• Optional automatic daily backups on a schedule you set.
• Automatic backups are pruned to the ten newest.
• Every backup is verified by reading it back before it counts.
• Import validates the file first and warns clearly before anything is replaced.
• Restoring is atomic and starts with a verified safety snapshot of your current data.
• A corrupted or hand-edited backup shouldn’t crash the app: bad values self-heal to defaults.

Polish and Platform#

Theme, Fullscreen, and Auto scroll#

Light	Dark

• Material You dynamic colors across the whole app, matching your device in both light and dark themes.
• Consistent cards and snackbar style everywhere.
• Fullscreen now is edge-to-edge, including notch areas.
• The theme toggle switches PDF dark mode in place. No flicker and no restart.
• Auto scroll moves by real elapsed time, pauses while you interact, and remembers its speed per book.

Reorganized Settings#

The settings page

• Settings were reorganized into searchable pages and sections.
• Every option was revised, obsolete ones were deleted, and titles and descriptions were rewritten for clarity.

A New Intro, About, and What’s New#

The About page	The What’s New page

• The About page and the Intro got rewritten from scratch with Material You.
• A new What’s New page presents each release, replacing the old dialog.

Fifteen Languages, Fully Translated#

MJ PDF v3 ships 7 new languages, making the app available in 15 languages: Arabic, German, Spanish, Persian, French, Hindi, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.

Thanks to community translators.

Much Faster Rendering#

Even though MJ PDF was famous for being a fast app, v3.0.0 made it faster across the board. MJ PDF now builds PDFium from source, optimized for speed. On top of that sits a reworked rendering pipeline:

• Pinch zoom renders whole-page snapshots instead of a patchwork of tiles, and pages re-render in steps while you pinch.
• A smarter tile cache with a fixed memory budget that evicts genuinely old tiles first.
• Search, contents, links, and covers all open the PDF off the main thread. No jank on big files.
• Every page gets a render-once preview, cached in memory and on disk, so pages show instantly.
• An idle sweep quietly pre-renders previews for the whole book, and scrubbing through a book draws them immediately.
• Rendering is chunked and cancellable: stale work dies in milliseconds instead of blocking the next page.
• Preview quality adapts to the device, so low-memory phones stay smooth.

Shared PDFs That Survive#

PDFs opened from other apps used to vanish once the sending app threw away the temporary file. Not anymore.

• A PDF shared from another app is silently copied to Documents/MJ PDF, and the copy becomes the book’s location.
• The copy only happens when the source is truly temporary, and you can switch it off in the History and Privacy settings page.
• Reopening a dead share recovers on its own: by using the saved copy, a library match, or a locate dialog that verifies the picked file is the same document.
• A background pass re-links broken records to rediscovered files by their content, restoring their reading progress.

Hundreds of Fixes and Improvements#

Too many to list here. A few worth highlighting:

• The database moved out of the cache directory, so history, passwords, and progress no longer vanish when Android clears the cache.
• Native memory leaks fixed.
• Dozens of crash scenarios removed.
• The viewer no longer goes permanently blank after switching away and back.
• Printing downloaded and password-protected PDFs now works, and the storage permission flow works on Android 10 and below.

Under the Hood#

The invisible re-work was as big:

• The code was re-architected around a single composition root, after years of growing in one giant screen.
• The last Java files are gone. The app is now fully Kotlin, on Android SDK 36.
• The libraries that were once lightly patched forks are now maintained as part of MJ PDF: they handle text selection, highlights, forms, signatures, margin detection, and dual page layout.
• PDFium, FreeType, and libpng are built from source with one script, and a guide documents the full build from a fresh Linux install.

How to Get It#

• Best way to get it? Droid-ify store.
• Want a direct APK link? Here it is.