pdfresh / about

Made for a more playful PDF.

PDFresh is an independent project exploring what a PDF can do: a short game, a personal record book, and a document you can keep.

We make the games distributed here and write the instructions around their actual behaviour. Our first release is Pulse Dash, a 30-second arcade game whose four pages hold the game, personal records, and English instructions. Stop the Bar adds a five-round timing game with named rankings and a saving guide. Turn & Connect is a collection of 30 pipe rotation puzzles with saved progress.

From PDF tools to PDF play.

PDFresh began with tools for checking and working with documents. Those tools remain available: you can inspect pages with X-Ray, merge PDFs, extract selected pages, or read an existing text layer. Games now have a place alongside them, with downloadable originals at the centre of the site.

What we publish.

Each game page identifies the downloadable file, release version, reader requirements, controls, and known limits. The game-page images are rendered from the supplied release PDFs. They show the actual title, records, and instruction pages.

The game’s release checks cover its scripts, PDF rendering, input and link behaviour, and saving and reopening records in PDFium. These checks are not a promise that every browser or phone will run it. We name the target reader and keep reader limitations visible.

Files you can keep.

Pulse Dash does not need a PDFresh account and does not make automatic network requests. Its records are kept in the PDF when saved with changes. The site’s document tools process selected files in the browser. Details about ordinary website requests and email are in the privacy policy.

Help us make it work better.

If an instruction is unclear or a file behaves differently in your reader, contact PDFresh. Tell us the game version, browser, and what happened. We use concrete reports to decide which explanation or behaviour to improve.