Saving and exporting

Refr never writes over a file you opened. Your work is kept in two kinds of output:

A good habit is to keep the workspace as your working copy and export a PDF whenever you need to send the document to someone.

Save a workspace

Press ⌘S, click Save in the global bar, or choose Save editable workspace in All tools.

• If the document came from a .pdfspace file or was saved as one before, Refr saves over that workspace without asking.
• Otherwise Refr asks where to save, suggesting <title>.pdfspace in your Documents folder.

To save a copy under a new name, press ⌥⌘S (File › Save Workspace As…) or choose Convert › Editable workspace. Later ⌘S saves go to the new file.

After saving, the unsaved-changes dot disappears from the tab and the file is added to Recent files. The workspace embeds the complete original PDF. Treat it as a copy of the document, and see Privacy and limitations.

Workspaces are compatible with PdfSpace. The format is described in The .pdfspace format.

Export a PDF

Press ⇧⌘S, click Export PDF, or choose Convert › PDF document. Refr suggests <title>.pdf.

The exported PDF is built from the original pages, not from images of them:

• The page content is copied as is, so text stays selectable and searchable, and vector graphics stay sharp.
• Page order, duplicates, deletions and inserted blank pages follow the workspace.
• Workspace rotation is applied to each page's rotation, and crops become the page's crop box.
• Annotations are drawn into the page as vector graphics and text.
• Comments are also added as standard PDF comments. See Comments in exported PDFs.

What an exported PDF doesn't have:

• Editable Refr annotations. Keep the workspace for that.
• Workspace bookmarks, resolved status, and the document title and author.
• Interactive form fields you filled with text. The fields are left untouched, and your text is drawn on top.

Text in annotations uses the PDF standard font Helvetica, which covers Western European characters (Windows-1252). Characters outside that set may not appear in the exported PDF.

To export only some pages, see Extracting pages.

Export a PNG image

Convert › PNG image · current page saves the current page as a PNG at 2× resolution (144 pixels per inch), with the longest side capped at 4096 pixels. The image is rendered from the exported PDF, so annotations look exactly as they do there.

Export plain text

Convert › Plain text saves a .txt file with the text of every page, each starting with a Page N heading. The text of added text annotations and comments follows each page's text. Pages without a text layer, such as scans, have no text.

Split into single-page PDFs

Convert › Split into single-page PDFs, or Split into PDFs in Organize mode, saves a ZIP archive with one PDF per page, named <title>-page-001.pdf, <title>-page-002.pdf, and so on. Each PDF has that page's annotations, rotation and crop. You can split documents of up to 300 pages into archives of up to 256 MB.

Print

Press ⌘P or click Print. Refr exports the document to a temporary PDF and opens it in your default PDF viewer, usually Preview. Print from there with ⌘P. The printed copy looks exactly like an exported PDF.

The recovery copy

While a document has unsaved changes, Refr keeps a recovery copy of it on your Mac:

~/Library/Application Support/Refr/recovery.pdfspace

• The copy is written about a second after each change, and the status bar confirms it. When you quit, a pending copy is written right away.
• There is one recovery copy. It holds the document with unsaved changes that you changed most recently. If that document is saved, closed or undone back to its saved state, the copy switches to the next document with unsaved changes.
• When no open document has unsaved changes, for example after you save or when you close a document and discard its changes, the copy is deleted.

If Refr quits unexpectedly, or you quit with unsaved changes, the next launch asks Restore unsaved changes?

• Restore opens the copy in a new tab. It's marked as unsaved, so closing it asks first, and the recovery copy is kept until you save it.
• Discard deletes the copy.

The recovery copy is a safety net, not a save. Save a workspace to keep your work permanently.

How files are written

Refr writes every file to a temporary file next to the destination, then renames it into place. If the Mac crashes during a save, you're left with either the old file or the new one, never half of each. Large exports run in the background, and the window stays responsive.