Inlinea

A native PDF reader and annotation tool for Linux, built with Python, GTK 4, and Libadwaita.

I couldn’t find a PDF editor on Linux that felt clean and fast for annotation. Most tools were either powerful but clunky, or simple but missing basic workflows, so I started building one. Inlinea is meant to be fast, minimal and just work - open a PDF, highlight stuff, add notes, save, done.

What it does

• Draggable tabs
  pull a tab out into its own window, drag it back to merge. Browser-style.
• Session restore
  remembers every open file, scroll position, zoom level, and active tab across restarts.
• Crash recovery
  detects unclean shutdowns and brings back your full workspace on relaunch.
• Native PDF annotations
  highlights, underlines, text notes, area selections. Saved as standard PDF markup, no sidecar files.
• Flattened export
  burns annotations into the page layout for sharing with anyone, regardless of their reader.
• Text formatting
  • bold
  • italic
  • underline
  • font picker on text annotations. Full undo/redo for everything.
• Virtual scroll
  pages load and unload as you scroll. 500-page PDFs stay snappy.
• Focal-point zoom
  Ctrl+Scroll and pinch zoom into where your cursor is, not the center of the screen.

Getting Started

Dependencies

You'll need GTK 4, Libadwaita, Poppler, Cairo, and PyMuPDF installed.

Arch Linux (AUR)

yay -S inlinea

Fedora / RHEL:

sudo dnf install \
  gtk4-devel libadwaita-devel python3-gobject \
  python3-cairo poppler-glib-devel cairo-devel python3-pymupdf

Ubuntu / Debian:

sudo apt install \
  libgtk-4-dev libadwaita-1-dev python3-gi python3-cairo \
  libgirepository1.0-dev libpoppler-glib-dev gir1.2-poppler-0.18 python3-pymupdf

Install & Run

git clone https://github.com/kaurmanjot20/inlinea.git
cd inlinea

# Run directly from source
python3 -m inlinea

Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S gtk4 libadwaita python-gobject python-cairo poppler-glib python-pymupdf
git clone https://github.com/kaurmanjot20/inlinea.git
cd inlinea

# Run directly from source
python3 -m inlinea

Working in a virtualenv

If you work in a virtualenv, create it with --system-site-packages:

python3 -m venv --system-site-packages .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e .
python3 -m inlinea

GTK, Poppler, and Cairo bindings (python3-gi, python3-cairo) are installed via the system package manager, not PyPI. A standard venv hides those packages; --system-site-packages lets the venv inherit them while keeping everything else isolated. The pip install -e . registers the inlinea package itself into the venv.

Desktop Integration (Right-click "Open With" support)

If you are running from source and want to be able to double-click PDFs or right-click to "Open With -> Inlinea" in your system file manager, simply run the desktop integration script:

bash install-desktop.sh

This will automatically create a local executable wrapper in ~/.local/bin/ and register the .desktop shortcut with your system.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome - whether it's a bug fix, a new feature, or just cleaning something up. Check out the Contributing Guidelines for how to get started.

All PRs go through review before merging. Please open an issue first if you're planning something big so we can discuss the approach.

License

MIT - see LICENSE for details.