VARAKSupport
Most questions are answered below. If yours isn't, write to support@varak.app with your macOS, iPadOS or iOS version and, if it's about a specific file, what kind of file it is; the file itself is never required.
1. Requirements and installation
- Mac: macOS 12 Monterey or later. Apple Silicon (M-series) and Intel Macs are both supported by the same download.
- iPad and iPhone: iPadOS or iOS 17 or later. The same App Store page installs VARAK PDF on all three.
- About 300 MB of disk space, including the bundled OCR models and fonts.
- Install from the App Store. VARAK is sandboxed and updates arrive through the App Store like any other app. Nothing is downloaded from anywhere else.
- To make VARAK the default app for PDFs: select any PDF in Finder, press ⌘I, choose VARAK under "Open with", and click Change All.
2. Getting started
Launch VARAK and you land on the Home tab: open a PDF, drop one onto the window, or pick a quick tool (Create PDF from images, Combine, OCR, Compress). Every document opens in its own tab; Home stays pinned first so the tools are always a click away.
Across the top are the six modes. The toolbar under them changes with the mode and shows only what that mode needs. In Read mode there is no toolbar at all; page navigation, zoom and Fit live in the bar at the bottom. The Inspector on the right appears when something is selected and gets out of the way when nothing is.
Save with ⌘S. Before VARAK replaces your file it reopens its own output and checks the page count and text; if anything looks wrong it refuses and your original is untouched. That refusal is rare and is worth reporting.
3. Pro, purchases and refunds
What Pro is
VARAK PDF Pro is a single in-app purchase (US $19.99, shown in your local currency in the App Store) for Mac, iPad and iPhone together. It is not a subscription and never renews. It unlocks: Statement to Excel, export to Word, Compare, headers and footers with Bates numbering, redaction and Find personal data, certificate signatures, Document Packs, Batch processing, and saving translated copies. Everything not in that list is free — including editing and saving text, OCR, combining, compressing and passwords.
You can try every Pro tool free for 3 days. The trial starts only when you press Start Free 3-Day Trial on the Pro screen, and nothing is charged when it ends: the Pro tools simply lock again until you buy. Use Restore Purchase on the same screen to bring Pro to another Mac, iPad or iPhone.
Buying
The first time you use a Pro feature, the "Unlock VARAK PDF Pro" sheet appears with the price. Choose Unlock and complete the purchase in the App Store window. Pro switches on immediately; the feature you were using continues where it left off.
Restoring on another Mac
Pro belongs to your Apple Account, not to a machine. On a new or reinstalled Mac, open the Pro sheet from any Pro feature and choose Restore purchase, or use VARAK ▸ Restore Purchases. Make sure the Mac is signed in to the App Store with the same Apple Account that bought Pro. Family Sharing applies if you have enabled it for in-app purchases.
Refunds
Purchases are made with Apple, so refunds are decided by Apple. Request one at reportaproblem.apple.com within the period Apple allows. The developer cannot see your payment and cannot issue a refund directly, but if something is wrong with the app, write in; it will be fixed.
4. The six modes
Read
Select text by dragging, copy it with ⌘C, search with ⌘F. Search is Turkish-aware and accent-insensitive by default; the Aa button makes it exact. Day, Night and Sepia are under View ▸ Appearance and only change how the page is displayed, never the file. Selecting text shows a small popover for Highlight, Underline, Strikethrough and Comment.
Edit
Click any line to retype it in the document's own font; paragraphs reflow as you type. Drag a selected item to move it, use the handles to resize, and change font, size, bold, italic and colour from the floating bar or the Inspector. Add new text, images, rectangles, ellipses, lines and arrows from the toolbar; Whiteout covers an area with the page colour; Redact removes what is under the mark when you apply the redactions. Edit ▸ Replace All rewrites every occurrence. If a line shows "cannot be retyped", its font has no usable character map for that text; the rest of the paragraph still edits.
Annotate
Highlight (H), Underline (U), Strikethrough, Comment (N), Pen (P), Text box, Callout, Stamp, Shapes and Link. Click an annotation to select it and edit its colour, opacity, width or comment in the Inspector; press Delete to remove it; double-click to edit a comment. The Comments tab in the sidebar lists every note in the document and jumps to it.
Sign
+ Create opens the signature sheet: draw with the trackpad, type your name in a script font, or upload a PNG or JPG. Saved signatures and initials live in the Signature ▾ and Initials ▾ galleries; pick one and click the page to place it, then drag or resize. Certificate… signs the document with a .p12, .pfx or .pem certificate you choose; the signature verifies in Preview and Acrobat. Editing a signed document removes its certificate signature, so sign last.
Forms
Click a field to fill it: type in text fields, tick checkboxes, choose from dropdowns and radio groups. Tab moves to the next field, Enter confirms, Esc cancels. Hold ⌥ and click a field to edit its properties instead of its value. Draw new fields with the toolbar tools. Import data and Export data exchange form values; Flatten burns the values into the page so the form can no longer be changed.
Pages
Select pages in the grid (⇧ and ⌘ extend the selection), then rotate, duplicate, delete, insert a blank or image page, add a PDF, extract the selection, or split every page into its own file. Numbering & layout holds page numbers, Bates numbering, headers and footers, crop and replace.
5. Document tools
| Tool | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Recognise text (OCR) | Toolbar in Read, Document menu | Recognises the text in scanned pages — in the many languages of Apple's on-device text recognition — so it can be searched, copied and edited. Pro. |
| Statement to Excel | Document menu, ⌘⇧E | Turns a bank or card statement into an .xlsx workbook with dates, descriptions and amounts in columns. Works on scans after OCR; always produces a spreadsheet, falling back to a row grid when no dated table is found. Pro. |
| Compare | Document menu, ⌘⇧C | Shows what changed between this document and another. Free. |
| Find personal data | Document menu | Suggests IBANs, card numbers, ID numbers, e-mails and phone numbers as redaction marks for you to review. Pro. |
| Document Health | Document menu, ⌘⇧H | Reports rendering, encoding and structure problems and offers fixes. Free. |
| Export | File ▸ Export | Word document, images (JPEG/PNG), plain text; selected pages as PDF; every page as PNG. Pro for Word/images/text. |
| Create / Combine / Compress | File menu, Home tiles | PDF from images; several files into one; a smaller file that still opens everywhere. Pro. |
| Protect / Remove password | File menu | Password protection with owner permissions; removal of a password you know. Pro. |
| Batch Process | File menu, ⌘⇧K | Applies an action to every PDF in a folder with one queue: compress, OCR, protect, redact, export and more. Files that fail are reported without stopping the rest. Pro. |
| Encoding override | Document menu | Forces Windows-1254 (Turkish) or default decoding for documents whose fonts are mislabelled. |
6. Keyboard shortcuts
| Action | Keys |
|---|---|
| Open · Save · Save As · Print · Properties | ⌘O · ⌘S · ⌘⇧S · ⌘P · ⌘I |
| New tab · Close tab · New window | ⌘T · ⌘W · ⌘⇧N |
| Find · Add PDF to document · Export selected pages | ⌘F · ⌘⇧O · ⌘E |
| Undo · Redo · Select all | ⌘Z · ⌘⇧Z · ⌘A |
| Zoom in · Zoom out · Fit page · Sidebar | ⌘+ · ⌘− · ⌘0 · ⌘⇧S in Read |
| Modes: Read, Edit, Annotate, Sign, Forms, Pages | 1 to 6 |
| Edit tools: Select, Text, Image, Rectangle, Ellipse, Line, Arrow, Whiteout, Redact | V T I R E L A W X |
| Annotate tools: Highlight, Underline, Comment, Pen, Signature | H U N P S |
| Statement to Excel · Compare · Document Health · Bates and headers · Batch | ⌘⇧E · ⌘⇧C · ⌘⇧H · ⌘⇧B · ⌘⇧K |
| Stop a long operation | Esc, or the Stop waiting button on the spinner |
7. Troubleshooting
A Pro feature says it needs to be unlocked, but I already paid
Choose Restore purchase on the Pro sheet. Confirm the Mac's App Store is signed in with the Apple Account that made the purchase (App Store ▸ Settings). If the App Store cannot reach Apple, Restore fails safely and you can try again online; Pro itself never needs the internet once restored.
Turkish or other characters look wrong after editing
Use Document ▸ Encoding ▸ Windows-1254 if the document's fonts were mislabelled, then edit again. If a specific line refuses to be retyped, the font has no reliable map for it; add a new text box over it instead. Send the document type (not the document) to support if it keeps happening.
Save was refused
VARAK checked its own output and found it wouldn't reopen correctly, so it did not touch your file. Try Save As to a new name, run Document Health, and please report it: it means a document shape the app has not met before.
OCR or Statement to Excel is slow or produces nothing useful
OCR runs on your device and scales with page size and count; a 200-page scan takes minutes, and Escape cancels. Statement to Excel needs recognisable text: run OCR first on scans, and check the page is not sideways (rotate it in Pages).
The app feels frozen
Every long operation shows a spinner with a Stop waiting button; press it or Esc. If a spinner never appears and the app is unresponsive, force-quit and relaunch: your unsaved work will be offered for recovery from the Home tab.
Double-clicking a PDF opens another app
Set VARAK as the default as described in section 1. If a PDF opens in VARAK but the window doesn't come forward, update to the current version; this was fixed in 1.1.
A form's fields cannot be filled
VARAK rebuilds forms whose producer omitted the field catalogue, so most "dead" forms fill normally. A form that has been flattened has no fields left; add text boxes in Edit mode instead. Fields marked read-only by their author cannot be edited without ⌥-click to change the property.
8. Known limitations
- Indic scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil), Thai, Myanmar and Khmer are displayed and searchable but cannot be retyped; the app says so rather than guess.
- Korean text is preserved intact but new Korean text cannot be typed, because system .ttc collections cannot be embedded.
- Arabic and Hebrew editing is per line; paragraph-level bidirectional reflow is planned.
- Word export converts text, fonts, images and page size; tables become paragraphs and multi-column layouts become sequential text.
- OCR languages: those of Apple's on-device text recognition on your device — many languages, depending on your macOS, iPadOS or iOS version.
- PDF/A export, PowerPoint export and files encrypted with public-key security handlers are not supported in this version.
- Hardware signing tokens (e-imza, PKCS#11) are not supported; use a file-based certificate.
- Pro is one purchase for all three devices. On iPad and iPhone, Word export leaves out images; every other Pro tool works on all three today.
9. Privacy in one paragraph
VARAK has no server, no account, no cloud, no analytics and no cloud AI. Your documents stay on your Mac, iPad or iPhone. The privacy policy says the same thing at length.
10. Contact
E-mail support@varak.app. Include your device and its macOS, iPadOS or iOS version, the VARAK version (on the Mac: VARAK PDF ▸ About VARAK PDF), and what you were doing. Never send confidential documents; a description of the document type is enough, and if a sample is needed a redacted or synthetic one will be requested.
Developer: Erdal Beyoğlu · varak.app