Docs / Troubleshooting Guide

Troubleshooting Guide

Find answers and verified solutions to common operational issues.

1. Password-Protected PDFs

If a PDF document is encrypted with an owner or user password:

  • BarePDF opens a secure password prompt modal.
  • Type the password and press Enter.
  • If the password is correct, the document unlocks and renders immediately.
  • If incorrect, an inline error message appears allowing you to retry.

2. Document Fails to Open or Appears Blank

  • Corrupted PDF: Verify the file opens in another application. BarePDF relies on strict PDFium parsing standards and rejects malformed headers.
  • File Permissions: Ensure the file is not locked exclusively by another application.
  • Path Length Limit: Ensure the file path does not exceed standard Windows path limits unless long paths are enabled in Windows settings. BarePDF fully supports paths with spaces and Unicode characters (e.g. Japanese (日本語)).

3. PDF File Associations / Default Reader Setup

If double-clicking a .pdf file opens another program:

  1. Open Windows Settings (Win+I) → Apps → Default apps.
  2. Type .pdf in the file type search bar.
  3. Select BarePDF from the list of registered applications.
  4. Click Set default.

Alternatively, right-click any .pdf file in File Explorer → Open with → Choose another app → Select BarePDF and check “Always use this app”.

4. High Memory Usage on Very Large PDFs

BarePDF automatically bounds both raw PDFium bitmaps and the copies attached to Slint using byte-budgeted Least Recently Used (LRU) caches. Pages outside the current viewport are evicted automatically; there is no user-facing memory-budget setting.