Help

Short answers to the questions that come up most.

Getting access

There is no sign-up. Your organization's administrator invites you by email, and that invitation is your account. If you were expecting one and it has not arrived, ask your administrator to send it again — they can also see whether it was already used.

Your account

Your account page is where you look after your own account. From there you can:

• Give yourself a name, shown to your administrators and in invitations you send.
• Change your email address. A code goes to the new address, and nothing changes until you enter it. Your old address is told.
• See where you're signed in and sign any browser or desktop app out, or sign out of everything else at once.
• Leave an organization, or switch between the ones you belong to.
• Choose your email notices: new sign-ins from an unfamiliar network, and activity in organizations you run.
• Download your data, or delete your account.

In the app, open the account menu and choose Manage your account….

Signing in

The invitation email carries two ways in: a link that signs you in with one click, and a six-digit code you can type in instead — useful on a different device, or if the link has expired. Neither one requires a password, and neither is reused: once you have signed in with one, that invitation is spent.

Belonging to several organizations

One email address can belong to more than one organization. If you do, Whitney Pages asks which one to sign in to the first time it matters, and remembers your choice on that device after that. To work in a different one, sign out and sign in again, or use the switch organization option where it appears in the app.

Working offline

Once signed in, Whitney Pages keeps working with no network connection at all — that is the whole point of a PDF editor that never uploads your documents. An installed copy checks that your access is still valid whenever it can reach the sign-in service: at startup, when its window comes back into focus, and about once an hour. If it cannot reach that service, it keeps working for up to 14 days from the last time it checked in successfully. After 14 days offline, it asks you to reconnect and sign in again before it will keep going.

"Remember my work on this device"

Your organization can turn this off, for example for shared computers. If it has, the setting is shown turned off and anything already kept on the device is cleared.

Turn this on and Whitney Pages saves your open documents and everything you have done to them — reordering, marks, rotations — in your browser's own storage on your machine, so they are back the next time you open the app on that device. This never leaves your device, nothing is uploaded, and you can turn it off and clear it at any time from the same setting.

Saving your work

How you keep a finished document depends on where you are running Whitney Pages:

• Chrome or Edge, in a tab: once you have opened a file from disk, Save writes back to that same file and Save as… lets you choose a new one — the same as any desktop editor. This uses a browser feature that Firefox and Safari do not yet support.
• Any other browser: use Export, which offers the result as a download rather than writing back to the original file.
• The desktop application: Save and Save as work exactly as they do in any installed app, writing to the file you opened.

Edit text vs. Black out

Edit text covers the original words on the page with new ones you type. It is meant for correcting or updating what a page says — the original text is still present underneath in the file and can still be copied or extracted, so it is not a way to remove something confidential.

Black out actually removes the text it covers from the exported file. It has known limits: text inside certain embedded page content, or in fonts Whitney Pages cannot measure precisely, may occasionally be left in place, or a slightly larger area than you drew may be affected. Because your documents never reach us, we cannot check an export for you — always confirm, in the exported file itself, that anything you meant to black out is really gone before you share it.

Reading scanned pages (OCR)

Your organization can turn this off. If it has, Whitney Pages says so when a scanned page would be read.

Making a scanned page searchable requires the text-recognition engine, which Whitney Pages downloads the first time you ask it to read a page — this needs an internet connection. Once downloaded, the words it recognized are kept with the document, and no document content is sent anywhere as part of this: only the request for the engine and language files themselves leaves your device.

Installing the app

Whitney Pages is available for macOS and Windows from the downloads page. Downloading it is open to anyone, but the installed app will not open a document until you sign in with an account your organization's administrator has created.

Lost access to your mailbox

If you are still signed in somewhere, change your address yourself from your account page before you lose the old mailbox: a code goes to the new address, and your history comes with you.

If you can no longer sign in at all, ask your organization's administrator to invite your new address. They can remove the old one at the same time.

Contact support

Can't find what you need here? Ask your organization's administrator, who can reach Whitney Solutions.