FreePDF5.1.2

Open a text-based PDF in FreePDF to read it and translate its document text into another language. FreePDF, from zstar1003, is a MacOS Reading & Writing program released as freeware in version 5.1.2 for Intel and Apple Silicon Macs. It suits students, researchers, and professionals who consult foreign-language papers or other written PDF documents.

Translation settings accept English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Traditional Chinese as source and target languages. The translation backend can use Silicon Flow, locally running Ollama, or a custom OpenAI-compatible API, with environment parameters for the service, host, API key, and model. Silicon Flow translation requires a Silicon Flow API key and a selected chat model, while custom endpoints can accommodate providers such as Volcano Engine.

A separate question-answer backend supports online Silicon Flow, local Ollama, and other OpenAI-compatible custom services, using a configuration structure parallel to the translation settings. In practice, readers select their language pair and configure one or both backends before translating a document or asking questions about its content. Homebrew is also an available way to install the macOS program.

FreePDF relies on pdf2zh to detect text blocks and replace them with translated text, so scanned or image-only PDFs are unsupported because replacement text can overlap. Tables are not translated in the main version; a developer branch using pdf2zh_next adds that possibility, but its slower implementation has not been merged into the main branch.