Show HN: A beautiful and local-first PDF reader for studying dense things
Quincy is a local-first PDF reader for Mac that helps you work through dense documents. It features page-grounded AI for asking questions, summarizing, and quizzing, plus notes, bookmarks, read aloud, and on-device OCR for scanned PDFs.
The PDF reader for deep work.
Quincy is a local-first PDF reader for Mac that helps you work through dense documents. Ask questions, summarize pages, quiz yourself, take notes, and listen to passages aloud without losing your place.
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Page-grounded AIAsk, summarize, and quiz against the page you're reading.
A complete toolkitNotes, bookmarks, quizzes, and read aloud in one reader.
Works on any PDFCopies real text, or uses on-device OCR for scans.
Features
The core reading workflow.
Four things matter: the reader should be fast, AI should stay grounded in the page, speech should work on the passage you choose, and studying should be one click away.
Local-first reader
A lightweight PDF reader that stays out of your way.
Quincy copies PDFs into local app storage, remembers the page and zoom per book, and keeps the controls you use most in one compact toolbar.
Ask the page
Talk to the exact page you are reading.
Open the assistant beside the PDF and ask follow-up questions grounded in the current page. Answers stay next to the source instead of pulling you into another app.
Read aloud
Select the section you want to hear.
Press R or click Read, drag over the part of the page you care about, and Quincy cleans the extracted text before handing it to macOS speech.
Summary and quiz
Distill the page, then test yourself on it.
Generate a focused page summary or a five-question quiz. Wrong answers reveal the right choice and explanation without hiding the original page.
Get started
Download Quincy for Mac.
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