Papyrus for Mac

macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple Silicon

Version 1.6.3 · free on the Mac App Store · Availability ↓

In short

The Mac is where a library gets built and a draft gets written. Papyrus gives it a real three-column window — sidebar, paper list, and a detail pane that holds the abstract, the metadata, the Markdown notes, and the reading state at once — plus the two pieces of desk automation the other platforms have no use for: a folder that imports itself, and a .bib file that stays current while you write.

The Window

Everything about a paper in one pass of the eye. The sidebar carries the library's shapes — folders, tags, flags, Smart Collections, projects, notebooks. The middle column is the paper list with its filter row. The detail pane on the right holds the abstract, tags and folder and project membership, the Markdown notes, the overview metadata with its citation count, and the Reading card that remembers where you stopped and which pages you bookmarked.

Papyrus on Mac: the sidebar, the paper list, and a detail pane showing the Nature paper's abstract, Markdown notes, overview metadata, and Reading card. — **Fig. 1.** The library window. Nothing about the selected paper is more than one glance away.

**Fig. 1.** The library window. Nothing about the selected paper is more than one glance away.

Scoping the Library

A Smart Collection is a saved filter that keeps itself current. Set rules — text match, tag, document type, year, flag, PDF availability — and the collection re-evaluates as the library changes. Text Match, Tag Filter, and Document Type each take several values, and you choose whether a paper has to match any of them or all of them.

Selecting one scopes the whole window to it without moving a single paper out of the library. Folders, projects, and notebooks scope it the same way.

Papyrus on Mac with the Open Figure Papers Smart Collection selected, scoping the library to five figure-heavy papers. — **Fig. 2.** “Open Figure Papers” — a rule, not a pile. Nothing was filed anywhere to build it.

**Fig. 2.** “Open Figure Papers” — a rule, not a pile. Nothing was filed anywhere to build it.

Alongside the rules there is a manual pass worth knowing about: Review Duplicates, in Settings → Advanced, finds look-alike papers by PDF, DOI, or title and size, and merges each set only after you confirm — combining their tags, folders, projects, notes, and highlights rather than picking one and discarding the rest.

Reading & Markup

The reader is a native PDFKit window, not a viewer embedded in a database. Highlight, underline, strike through, draw freehand ink, leave notes, and bookmark pages; the inspector beside the page carries the markup list and the paper's reading note, rendered from Markdown with LaTeX math. A References tab looks up the open paper's reference list and related work by DOI, so you can follow a citation trail and add what matters without leaving the page.

Mac reader showing the Fig. 1 distribution-map page of the Nature whale necropolis article with the markup inspector open. — **Fig. 3.** A figure page with the markup inspector. The note, the page, and the eventual claim stay adjacent.

**Fig. 3.** A figure page with the markup inspector. The note, the page, and the eventual claim stay adjacent.

Desk Automation

Two things the Mac can do that a tablet cannot.

Watched Folder. Point Papyrus at a folder — Downloads is the obvious one — and every PDF that lands in it from then on imports itself, metadata lookup included. The papers you save from a browser stop needing a second step.

Live BibTeX export. Papyrus keeps a papyrus-library.bib file continuously up to date on disk. Point \bibliography{} at it once and LaTeX or Overleaf sees every paper you have added since, with no export step in the loop.

Both are opt-in, and both are ordinary files in ordinary places — nothing is hidden inside a container you cannot reach.

The bundled Safari extension adds the third: capture the paper on the current tab, or right-click any PDF, DOI, or arXiv link and save it. It captures from inside your Safari session, so a paper behind a publisher sign-in you already have access to saves too. Folder, tag, and project pickers sit in the popup, so a paper lands organized.

For linking Papyrus into the rest of your desk — Hookmark, Obsidian, Shortcuts, Keyboard Maestro — see the papyrus:// URL scheme.

Availability

Papyrus for Mac is free on the Mac App Store. Every feature included.

macOS 14 Sonoma or later · Apple Silicon · no account, no telemetry, no subscription.

Mac

Also on iPad and iPhone, sharing one library over iCloud.