Show HN: A beautiful and local-first PDF reader for studying dense things

Posted by oleksg 3 days ago

Recently, I found myself having to read the book "C++ primer" and I just couldn't do it. Maybe my attention span is too little now with Claude and Codex, maybe I'm lazy... but I just couldn't get myself to focus.

While reading, I needed something to do. I wanted to talk to the text, I wanted to leave notes, I wanted to use to use my keyboard to quickly flip through pages.

The only good available option on a Mac was "Preview" and it was ok, but definitely not there. So I built Quincy primarily for myself.

With it you can - "Talk" to the page you're reading, create a quiz about the page, and get a good summary - "Read" the page out-loud. Have your Mac read to you while you follow along. This helps with comprehension. - Copy text (to paste into an LLM), leave notes, bookmarks, etc.... - Anything else you'd want with a nice PDF reader

It's fully local. No cloud-sync (yet). All LLM calls are based on your keys. And TBH, you don't even need to use the AI features for this to be useful.

Try it out. Let me know what you guys think. This has been a quick project, so very rough around the edges. I plan on keeping it going (still haven't finished my book), and potentially open-sourcing down the line.

Comments

Comment by pavelpilyak 2 days ago

Looks great! Per-page assistant works for llm cost, but complex docs (actually, almost any professional books) are all about cross-page context (definitions, relation between two related pages) - how does it answer something that isn't on the current page, but related to one?

Comment by oleksg 2 days ago

sadly non of that right now. I think down the line I'll hook it up to an optional context/memory layer, so that it has an idea of what you've read so far. (lots of local open-source options iirc)

As you read, pages would be broken down and fed into this layer.

Comment by mmarian 2 days ago

I have a similar problem in having limited attention span when it comes to learn. I went into it from the opposite angle - just plan out what I want to learn, then start asking Claude to design the content for me. It's worked pretty well.

Comment by oleksg 2 days ago

actually thinking about... even now it's hard to capture my attention while reading. maybe I add some sort of awards/badges and custom-set progress system (per session) into this. Really trying to deal with the attention span issue hmmm

Comment by mmarian 1 day ago

Doubt badges work. You have to ask yourself why you're struggling to read it, and work from that. And remember, not all problems can be solved by technology.

Comment by oleksg 2 days ago

interesting, do you have it reference some book? or just straight talking to claude?

Comment by mmarian 1 day ago

Just straight talking to Claude without referencing a book. However, if I wanted to learn from a book, I'd probably follow the same approach and just send the book across.

Comment by mklifelife 2 days ago

Local-first products seem to be getting more attention lately. Privacy and speed are becoming strong selling points again. What made you decide to build a standalone reader instead of a browser extension?

Comment by oleksg 2 days ago

I wanted to be able to use this online on flights easily. Figured most people would be reading books commonly when there's no internet access.