Vecto Reader

Open a markdown (.md) file and read it as a finished document: headings, tables, highlighted code, footnotes. Works offline and asks for no account.

Vecto Reader opens markdown files on your iPhone and iPad. Open a .md file and it appears as a finished document: headings at their proper sizes, tables with borders, code with syntax colouring, images, quotes, lists and footnotes.

Markdown stays readable in a plain text editor, which is why so many tools write it. Reading it comfortably is the part that tends to be missing. You end up in a preview pane, a browser tab, or an editor you have to close again afterwards. This is a reader, and that is all it is.

READING

Use the table of contents to get through a long document. Search the full text. Change the type size to suit the screen. Light and dark follow your system setting.

OPENING A DOCUMENT

Choose Open in the app, or send a .md file to Vecto Reader from wherever you received it — Mail, Messages, Files.

SHARING A DOCUMENT

The document is encrypted on your own device and only the encrypted bytes are stored. The link appears on screen with a button to copy it, and the key travels in the part of the link that a browser never sends to a server, so the service holding the document cannot read it.

The document stays available for thirty days. Share the same document again within that period and the same link comes back instead of a second one.

IF THE FILE IS SIGNED

Markdown can carry a signature. Most of it does not, and Vecto Reader treats an unsigned file as entirely normal.

When a signature is there, the reader checks it on your own device, offline, at the moment you open the file. It reports who signed, when, whether the text changed after signing, and whether it recognises the issuer of the certificate. Each of those answers can be opened: the name, the moment, the issuer, the fingerprint, the algorithm.

That check is the reason this program was built. It is not the reason to use it every day.

PRIVACY

Opening a file makes no network request. There is no account, no sign-in and no telemetry. A document you open stays on your device. Sharing is the only thing that sends anything, and only when you ask for it.

HOW IT LOOKS

A document looks the same here as it does on the desktop and in the PDF, because it is the same rendering component. What you see is what the author laid out.

LANGUAGES

Dutch, English and French. The interface follows your device or your own choice; the document stays in its own language.