Importing a PDF pattern

Last updated 15 August 2026

Drop a PDF onto the scan screen, or pick it with "Choose files". The file is read entirely inside your browser — like everything else here, it is never uploaded — and the extracted text goes to the same parser and the same review screen as a scan or a paste.

Digital PDFs: the best-case input

A PDF exported from a designer's layout software carries its text inside the file, so Yarn Diary reads it directly — no photo recognition involved, which means no recognition errors. This is the highest-fidelity way to get a pattern into the app; if you own both the printed page and the PDF, import the PDF.

Layout is handled during extraction: lines are rebuilt in visual order, and two-column pages — common in magazine-style patterns — are detected by their gutter and read left column first, then right, instead of interleaving the two into nonsense.

Scanned PDFs

Some PDFs are photographs of pages wearing a .pdf extension — a page with (almost) no embedded text. Yarn Diary notices per page: any page whose text layer is effectively empty is rendered at double resolution and handed to the same in-browser text recognition the camera path uses, with the same trade-offs (clean print reads well; English only; unsure words get flagged in review). Mixed files work too — a digital pattern with a scanned schematic page is read page by page, each by the appropriate route.

The limits

The first 60 pages are read. Ordinary patterns never get close; a compilation e-book will. If your pattern sits past page 60 of a collection, extract or copy the relevant pages first — or simply select the pattern's text in your PDF reader and paste it in.
Password-protected PDFs can't be opened. Remove the protection with the tool that applied it, or fall back to paste.
Recognition on scanned pages needs its first-time download, same as camera scanning — the engine is fetched on first use and cached for offline use after that. Reading digital PDFs also fetches its (smaller) reader component the first time.

What happens to the file

Nothing is stored until you confirm the review screen, and the PDF itself is not kept — Yarn Diary saves the parsed rounds, not the document. Keep your PDFs wherever you normally keep them; the app only needs them for the ten seconds of import. This also means importing a purchased pattern stays within personal use — the pattern text lives only in your own browser storage (and your own Google Drive, if you sync).