Our desktop PDF app now speaks fourteen languages, on Mac and on Windows
Version 1.5.1 of Files.co PDF Suite, the desktop app from the same team behind reader.me, is out on both stores. The Mac version goes from seven interface languages to fourteen, Arabic among them.
reader.me runs in a browser tab and that is not going to change. Some jobs are just awkward in one, though — a folder with two hundred scanned invoices, a file heavy enough to make the browser sweat, a laptop signing paperwork with the certificate installed on it — and for those we also make a desktop app, Files.co PDF Suite, built by the same people behind this site.
Version 1.5.1 is now approved on both stores: Apple published it on 28 August and Microsoft finished certification on the 29th. It brings no new tools, and the reason to write about it is the part that never shows up in a feature list.
Fourteen languages, and it was not a copy and paste
The Mac app goes from seven interface languages to the fourteen Windows already had: Polish, Turkish, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Arabic join the original seven.
The plan was to carry the Windows catalogue across. Then we opened it and found seven of its languages were missing 219 keys between them, nearly all belonging to the tools added in the previous release — meaning anyone using the app in Polish or Turkish had been getting those bits in English, quietly, for months.
So it turned into 3,633 strings translated from scratch and reviewed one by one. The review caught around 350 mistakes, and the sort of mistake matters more than the number: placeholders written for one platform’s syntax and printed literally by the other, translations attached to the wrong message, and text naming the wrong system — including one string that told Mac users, in seven languages, about a certificate installed on Windows. None of that breaks a build. It just makes the app read like it was assembled by someone who does not speak your language.
Arabic needed the window turned around, not just the words
Changing language while the app was running swapped the words but left the layout alone, so Arabic came out written correctly inside a mirror-image window: text going one way, sidebars and toolbars the other.
Text direction is handled by the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm, which is a solved problem. The window around the text is not: where the sidebar sits, which way a progress bar fills, which corner holds the buttons. That is the application’s job, and it has to happen the moment you pick the language rather than on the next launch. It does now.
Two settings that were saved and then ignored
On both platforms you could choose an output folder and ask the app to open the result when it finished. Both were stored correctly, and then every tool ignored them and asked “Save as…” as though you had never set anything.
Every tool now leaves through a single point of exit, including the ones that produce several files at once. “Save as…” still asks every time, because that is the one place where you did ask to choose. And since the bug spread by being copied from one tool into the next, each platform now fails its own build if a new tool opens a save dialog of its own.
What changed on each platform
| macOS | Windows | |
|---|---|---|
| Approved | 28 August 2026 | 29 August 2026 |
| Interface languages | 7 → 14 | 14, unchanged |
| Arabic with right-to-left layout | New | New |
| Output folder and “open when finished” | Fixed | Fixed |
The app is on the Mac App Store and the Microsoft Store, and the detail is on its product page. If you would rather not install anything, the tools here are where you left them and nothing you drop on them leaves your device.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need the app if I already use the browser tools?
Not really. Everything here keeps working in your browser, offline included, and it is free. The app makes sense for jobs a tab handles badly: hundreds of files at once, documents big enough to strain the browser's memory, or signing with the certificate installed on your machine.
Which fourteen languages is it in?
Spanish, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Turkish, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Arabic. You switch in Settings, the change is immediate, and in Arabic the whole interface flips to read right to left.
Does it upload my files anywhere?
No, same as here. The app processes documents on your own machine, with no account and no internet connection required. Cut its network access and it carries on working.