Get started, 1 of 3
Open a folder
Pick a project folder. The browser asks for permission once. PDFy reads it, that's the entire setup.
From the home page
Click Open PDFy on the home page (or Open App in the header). You land on the editor. The first thing you see is a button asking you to pick a folder.
Clicking it opens your operating system's folder picker. Pick the project root. PDFy works best when you point it at the top-level folder rather than at one subdirectory at a time, because then the file tree mirrors what you'd see in your editor.
What the browser asks
Right after you pick a folder, the browser shows a permission prompt. Roughly something like this, depending on which browser you use:
View files in this folder
The site is asking to read files from the folder you just picked. It can't see anything outside that folder.
Click the confirm button. The browser is just double-checking that the site is allowed to read the folder you just picked. PDFy can't see anything outside that folder, ever. The privacy page has the full breakdown.
.gitignore is respected
By default PDFy reads any .gitignore files in the folder
and hides anything they exclude. So your node_modules,
your build/, your .next/, all the noise you don't want in a code printout,
gone by default.
If you want them back (rare, but it happens with submissions that explicitly require generated
files), there's a toggle in Settings to turn this off. PDFy still hides huge dirs like .git and node_modules for performance even when the toggle is off.
Coming back later
Once you've opened a folder, PDFy remembers it under a recents list. Next visit, open the recents sheet from the editor's header and click the project; the browser will ask for permission again, then drop you back into the same plan you had.