16 ms·

Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor

791 points by philjohnson 1y ago

Add text, input boxes, pictures, signatures, delete pages, merge PDFs and password protect them. All happening in the browser, 100% free and no sign-up.

behnamoh 1y ago
doesn't "edit" PDF text, just adds more.
- philjohnson 1y ago
  yes, that's why the description says "add text" not edit :) there aren't existing packages that can edit existing PDF text in the browser, but I'll do it myself sometime soon
  - kwanbix 1y ago
    The website says: Edit PDFs Freely & Privately, Right in Your Browser.
- wild_pointer 1y ago
  That's the problem with all the pdf editors available out there. I guess adding stuff is much easier than editing existing stuff which you didn't add, and can be laid out in a gazillion ways, because PDF is a format for viewing and printing, not for editing. I had a period when I worked with lots of documents. I could only find one fairly decent PDF editor which deserves to be called that way. I could use it to open any PDF and delete an existing element, or change text in an existing field. Sometimes things behaved funny, for example a text field can have each letter in a separate block, but I assume the tool did what it could within reasonable effort. It worked fine for me overall.
  - jbarrow 1y ago
    Editing text in PDFs is _really_ hard compared to other document formats because most PDFs don't really encode the "physics" of the document. I.e. there isn't a notion of a "text block with word wrapping," it's more "glyphs inserted at location X with font Y." If the PDF hasn't been made accessible, you have to do a lot of inferencing based on the layout about how things are grouped and how they should flow if you want to be able to make meaningful edits. Not impossible (Acrobat does it), but very challenging. It's part of the legacy of PDF as a format for presentation and print jobs, rather than typesetting.
    - benatkin 1y ago
      It's still what a PDF editor, as it says in the title, would do. With a quick Google I found one that I hadn't heard about before, and it let me edit some text and save it for free.
      - TechDebtDevin 1y ago
        Ask yourself, why would someone spend money on bandwidth for me to download something for free...
        philjohnson 1y ago
        PDF editor is used as a broadly encompassing term. Yes, other tools can edit existing text, but they upload your PDF to their servers, so it's not private if that's something you care about. There isn't anything off the shelf that enables editing existing text in the browser, but it's something I'll build from scratch. So you'll be able to edit existing PDF text without compromising privacy.
        wild_pointer 1y ago
        This can if I remember correctly (can't check now), but it's a POC and not a finished product https://github.com/ShizukuIchi/pdf-editor https://github.com/ShizukuIchi/pdf-editor
    - otsukare 1y ago
      Yes, and alongside formatting challenges, PDFs commonly only include the glyphs from the font that are actually used in the document. So if you had PDF with "Hello World" on it, you could feasibly change it to "Hello Hello", but wouldn't be able to change it to "Goodbye World" (as the glyphs for "G", "b", "y", and "e" are not included in the PDF) Sure, you could do a bit of detective work to figure out which font it was from the glyphs or something and lookup and insert new glyphs into the PDF, but I can't imagine a generic PDF editor being capable of doing this for you. Some editors get around this but just straight up switching the font(s) for the whole PDF, so they'll look different after saving.
  - layer8 1y ago
    PDF is really not a format designed for editing, of text content in particular. It’s only possible in limited circumstances.
  - hnick 1y ago
    PDF was basically created as a final presentation format, it's essentially append-only by design, which is why you hear so often of redactions just marking up a white/black box over text. You can edit text streams, which needs a decompress/recompress, messes up all the object reference offsets for the entire file, potentially adds or removes characters to the subset font, which may not be referenced by the glyphs but a number instead to intentionally break copy/paste/scrape (e.g. 'a' is not 'a' in the text stream, but a random number), etc. Assuming the text is even marked up as strings, and not individually positioned characters with nested offset co-ordinate scaling to further muddy the waters. The fact so many people want to edit PDFs probably indicates a design flaw on Adobe's side, when considering what customers really want.
- matsemann 1y ago
  What I miss in free alternatives is the ability to redact. Not just by placing a black bar above, but such that the text also leaves the PDF. Shouldn't even need to reflow other text as mentioned in another comment, as things would otherwise stay the same.
  - philjohnson 1y ago
    check out pdfredactoronline.com I also built that. I had to make it separate for now as it's using MuPDF JS library which has APGL licensing, but I might add it in here if it seems I can add it while still complying.
    - matsemann 1y ago
      Will check it out, thanks!
jdjdjdjdjd 1y ago
Seems broken to me. Uploaded a pdf but I cant scroll down to see the bottom of the pdf, its just stuck... tried with FF and safari, same deal.
- philjohnson 1y ago
  Fixed now!
a1371 1y ago
I like it! It has most of the features I need in a PDF doc and nothing of the bloat. The only features missing for me are: callout text comments, redact text, and flatten PDF. It's snappy and pretty easy to understand. Good job As much as I'd like it, we all know it can't remain "100% free and no sign-up". What's your plan to avoid enshitification?
- philjohnson 1y ago
  Thanks! Text comments, redaction and flattening are definitely features I'll add. One way it'll avoid enshitification is that I have no VCs or anything like that, it's just me. So I only answer to actual users. My hunch is that while PDF editing is something people commonly do, most people probably don't want to pay for it, at least for basic features. My plan is to add Google Adsense, but in a way that is non-obstructive/intrusive. Depending on feedback, I might add a paid plan for much more advanced features if there's demand. But all the features you mentioned that are missing, as well as all other basic features, will always remain free. Since all the editing happens in the browser, it's a win-win for privacy and lower resource utilization. I just have to render the webpage. It runs on a low cost VPS, so it costs me almost nothing to keep this software running. Given that, there's no current or future costs that would give any reason to remove free features.
  - colesantiago 1y ago
    > One way it'll avoid enshitification is that I have no VCs or anything like that, it's just me. So I only answer to actual users. > My plan is to add Google Adsense, but in a way that is non-obstructive/intrusive. Please do not do Google ads. Not only that this ruins the privacy of the users and further entrances Google's reach, but it further leads to enshitification which is what we don't want. Perhaps maybe a small tiny sponsor banner may be better.
    - philjohnson 1y ago
      Fair point. I added a contact email in the upper right for feedback and sponsorship. Let's see what happens
moffkalast 1y ago
You'd think at this point there would be a dozen solid competitors to Adobe Acrobat. You'd really fuckin think so. And yet filling out a pdf and signing it with a certificate (aka the bog standard procedure for much of modern bureaucracy) is still too much to ask for any pdf software on linux. It just doesn't exist. How?
- cbracketdash 1y ago
  I use LibreOffice Draw
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    Does that do a perfectly accurate import? Whenever I import PDF's into drawing programs, add something, and then export, something always seems to get messed up. Whether it's font glyphs, or font spacing, or something to do with layer ordering.
    - okanat 1y ago
      It doesn't except very trivial things.
  - tap-snap-or-nap 1y ago
    Why did I never think of this? Thanks!
- JLook 1y ago
  I use Scribus to edit PDfs https://scribus.net https://scribus.net
  - speerer 1y ago
    Weird: Your link is broken for me, but typing in exactly the same text to the address bar resolves perfectly. Is it somehow filtering out referrals from this site?
jbarrow 1y ago
Wonderful! Inserted form-fields show up in Preview and Acrobat, which is not a trivial task. I run a little AI-powered tool that automatically figures out where form fields should go (https://detect.penpusher.app https://detect.penpusher.app) and robustly adding form fields to the PDF was the hardest part. Fwiw, I do see the issue with being unable to scroll down across both Safari and Chrome.
- philjohnson 1y ago
  Thanks! I fixed the scrolling issue
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
cbracketdash 1y ago
Scrolling is broken. Also for modals, it'd be nice to be able to click anywhere on the screen to close it (or pressing Esc) rather than just pressing "cancel". Also for text, different fonts is a necessary requirement (and bolding, italics, underline, etc). Also, it seems like I can't edit text boxes after creating them... I can't even tell if I've selected the text box (an outline would be nice). Also the confirm modal for deleting a page is realllly annoying. You should just have it automatically delete the page and create an undo feature. (Basically store the original PDF, and store all the "actions" a user makes in an array, and then undo/redo the actions to the original pdf). Also the arrow to close the page overview on the left side of the screen is very unintuitive. Why does the entire page shift to the left? The only reason I'd use that feature is to see my centered page more clearly. On this topic, a zoom feature is super important too. Overall, the concept of a privacy-based PDF editor sounds really cool! Just note that for users to actually make a serious switch to this, you must at least match 1/4 of the quality of other PDF services like ilovepdf.com or smallpdf.com. Good luck!
- philjohnson 1y ago
  Scrolling is now fixed! And just updated so that if you click outside modal it closes. Working on update now so you can edit text you've already added. Agree with you regarding fonts, bolding underlining etc. and having instant page deletion with undo/redo. Will definitely be adding soon. Fixed the arrow closing the preview pane so that the page stays centered. I plan on adding a lot more features so that it's on par with ilovepdf.com and smallpdf.com. The libraries I'm already using support many of the features they have, so it'll be easy to add them while keeping everything fully in the browser. Thanks for the feedback!
  - cbracketdash 1y ago
    You're very welcome! Thanks for building this out! I look forward to using it :)
nizarmah 1y ago
This is really nice! Kudos. Small request: When I have a document open, ask to prevent accidentally closing the tab. Large request: Resizing pictures and signatures.
- philjohnson 1y ago
  Thanks! Ask to prevent accidentally closing the tab is a great suggestion, I just added it! Resizing pictures and signatures is definitely something I'll add very soon.
speerer 1y ago
Nice work. I've been building something lately to manipulate PDFs in the browser for privacy, although it's quite a different use case. I think I see you're using pdf-lib and jspdf - both great libraries, and I'm using both, but: (1) Have you seen the recent WASM compilation of MuPDF? I am also using it for some functions and find it really excellent with accessible APIs and highly functional. Worth an try! (2) We chose different forks of the (unmaintained) pdf-lib - is there a reason you went with `pdf-lib-plus-encrypt`? I chose the cantoo fork, which seemed well-maintained to me - but I didn't research many others so would be interested to know if there is a good reason.
- philjohnson 1y ago
  (1) Yes, I am very familiar with the WASM compilation of MuPDF. It's got a lot of great features. I actually built another product pdfredactoronline.com that does redaction fully in the browser using the MuPDF WASM compilation. The reason I don't use it in BreezePDF is MuPDF has an APGL license which requires open-sourcing any code that uses their software. Which, I guess technically anything fully browser based is essentially open sourced :) so perhaps I could use it here. Since a lot of the basic functionality I've added so far is also covered by more permissible packages like the ones you mentioned, I've started out just using those. But thanks for bringing that up, I'll revisit using MuPDF for redaction and other features (2) I went with pdf-lib-plus-encrypt because the original pdf-lib doesn't have functionality for password-protecting PDFs, and since pdf-lib-plus-encrypt does, I used it so I could have that feature
  - speerer 1y ago
    Thanks for the insight. Yes, the AGPL isn't a problem for me - I didn't check your licence as I could just view source :)
  - sroussey 1y ago
    Is your code available?
    - what 1y ago
tbarbe 1y ago
I created a similar offline tool during covid because I didn't want to upload sensitive data to random servers, it's open source if that can be useful to someone else : https://timothebarbe.github.io/pdfModer https://timothebarbe.github.io/pdfModer (Im not a front end dev, the UI is not very good)
Labo333 1y ago
Nice! Recently I had the need for pdf censoring, aka not adding black rectangles but actually removing the content underneath and I still haven't found a suitable tool. Any recommendation? Or even python library to do it?
- fortran77 1y ago
  Do you want the black rectangle and the content removed? There are "redaction" tools. https://smallpdf.com/redact-pdf https://smallpdf.com/redact-pdf
  - cbracketdash 1y ago
    This likely uploads your content to their servers
- andrecarini 1y ago
  Honestly, your best bet for securely erasing data from a PDF is by adding the black bars, printing it and then scanning the print.
  - kmoser 1y ago
    You can bypass the messy printing step by just printing the PDF as an image, then import or OCR the image as a new document.
- mamonoleechi 1y ago
  you can do it easily with Inkscape which supports the pdf format
- philjohnson 1y ago
  I developed another tool pdfredactoronline.com that does this. Full redaction/removal of content, not just blacking out text. I didn't include it in this tool for now due to the APGL license of the library that enables the redaction, but since something fully in the browser is kinda open source already, I'll see if I can comply with the license while including it in BreezePDF
johnea 1y ago
Why would you want functionality like this to be in a browser? Isn't a browser for interfacing to http?
- vntok 1y ago
  This tool is hosted on a website, and you access that website like all other websites, using a browser interfacing with HTTP.
- layer8 1y ago
  The functionality isn’t actually in the browser, it’s in the files downloaded via HTTP.
  - philjohnson 1y ago
    Yes, that's a good way of framing it. Though technically the files are executed in the browser. Will be releasing downloadable desktop version soon.
- philjohnson 1y ago
  It's accessible via a website so that you don't have to download anything, and everything running in your browser means the PDF never leaves your device, so it's 100% private.
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    Not having to download anything is not a plus. Much better to make an actual application that you download, and which never touches someone else's server.
kzrdude 1y ago
Add a text block - it adds a block that wraps (it's a bit narrow, would like to change its size). When downloading the PDF, the text block is not wrapped, so it doesn't match the way it looks in the editor. Tested in Firefox (but it's the same in Chromium). Nice work on the interface and the offline & local way it works is very welcome!
- philjohnson 1y ago
  Hm, mind describing more about how it wraps? Assuming you're referring to text you added? I haven't encountered that myself, but will definitely try and fix. And thanks!
  - kzrdude 1y ago
    Just that the text block after entering four-five words starts on a new line, it's like regular soft wrapping, looks like I get a 4cm wide text box to write into. Which is fine as a feature, only bug is the two items mentioned (can't resize it and doesn't show up in the pdf with the same width of the text box).
    - philjohnson 1y ago
      Wrapping fixed! So now it only goes to a new line if you hit enter, which is probably the best approach. So the text should render the same in the editor as it does when it downloads. Thanks for the feedback, and let me know if you run into any more issues!
      - kzrdude 1y ago
        Great, good luck with your project
ghostly_s 1y ago
What reason do I have to believe this will still exist in 3 months when I need it next?
- philjohnson 1y ago
  There's no VC backing behind this, it's just me. And it's actually a win-win to have all the PDF editing happen in the browser. It both offloads resource usage to a local computer and makes it private. All I have to do is render the page and that's it. Given that, it costs me almost nothing to keep it running, so there's no reason to take it down.
VisualByte 1y ago
Where is the repo? I do not trust the privacy...
- philjohnson 1y ago
  I might post the repo, but if you don't trust it you can just open the Network inspection tab and you'll see that zero network requests are made when you edit a PDF
  - kmoser 1y ago
    You can also use "offline mode" in Dev Tools to ensure that tab doesn't send or receive network traffic. Then you don't have to sit there monitoring it.
VisualByte 1y ago
I do not trust the privacy here...
- maxloh 1y ago
  You can monitor Network requests the application made with DevTools.
- cbracketdash 1y ago
  All the requests made through DevTools seem to only load PDF scripts. I didn't detect any POST requests. Of course, there is no guarantee that this will remain... regularly checking network activity before uploading a private document isn't too hard
nestorD 1y ago
Nice! I will give it a try later today. For people who want a non web-based alternative, these days I use Xournal++ (https://xournalpp.github.io/ https://xournalpp.github.io/) to do that type of edition locally. What I am still looking for is a good way to clean scanned PDFs: split double pages, clean up text and make sure it is in lack and white, clean deformations and margin, cut and maybe rotate pages, compress the end result.
- fiddlerwoaroof 1y ago
  For splitting double pages, this is the best tool I’ve seen: https://github.com/mbaeuerle/Briss-2.0 https://github.com/mbaeuerle/Briss-2.0 For the other issues, I haven’t found any single good tool, but I’ve stitched together things like unpaper, ghostscript and deskew ( https://github.com/galfar/deskew https://github.com/galfar/deskew ). Also, if you need OCR, hocr-tools and Google’s Document AI ocr API have worked really well for me (I tried Gemini, but you run into issues with big documents).
kevinlinxc 1y ago
I use stirling-pdf for this, ran locally with docker run -d -p 8080:8080 -e DOCKER_ENABLE_SECURITY=false --name stirling-pdf frooodle/s-pdf:latest Lots of features, OP you should definitely check this out
- theturtletalks 1y ago
  Stirling is a life saver, they have a web UI too: https://stirlingpdf.io https://stirlingpdf.io
- philjohnson 1y ago
  Seems cool! Thanks for sharing. Even though it's MIT licensed it's written in Java, so unfortunately I can't borrow any code, but it's nice for inspiration.
- nicce 1y ago
  Official image seems to be "docker.stirlingpdf.com/stirlingtools/stirling-pdf:latest" BTW.
throwanem 1y ago
I tossed a legal document at it which was recently of passing interest to me, and it looks like embedded fonts still need some work. I'm not inclined to share a test case from what I have, which relates to a change of name and in any case was not really prepared by anyone especially competent when it comes to PDFs and their content; I tested with the first, facially void, version I was given. But it is possible I'll find more use for this tool, and if a shareable test case does come along then I'll do so. (And heaven knows with this document format, embedded fonts are a total nightmare always, even somehow in programmatic authoring. I'm not criticizing!) On a similar note, a downloadable (single-file HTML or so, although these days some kind of HTTP service is a practical necessity) version would be nice to have. Low pri even from my perspective; it isn't that I spend a lot of time in places with no cell signal, so much as just that tethering on an a la carte plan gets out of hand pretty quick, since applications aren't at all required to honor or even notice the existence of the "data saver" option. This is really neat! Thanks for posting it, I've bookmarked it for later use in the "just need a quick tweak" kind of case. I'll look forward to seeing how it develops!
- wffurr 1y ago
  Fonts on the web are super hard. There’s hardly any useful browser APIs for the kind of typesetting you need for PDFs: itemization, character bounding boxes, font file sub setting, etc. To solve or properly, you need to include a lot of code, e.g. all of harfbuzz compiled to wasm.
  - throwanem 1y ago
    Well, that's the thing. Web fonts are hard. PDF fonts are super hard. Both at once is...actually maybe not hideous these days. Oh, I would not wish the task of devising such an algorithm, but the subset of vector fonts supported in PDF and that in browsers aren't totally disjoint, I think. Modern processors can handle the relevant conversion math without really waking from sleep, which will no doubt make it more frustrating when some W3C third party resource security model WG fistfight from 2013 makes it impossible to both construct and use a webfont on the client. (There may be some hideous blob URL magic, but those are length constrained so you could up in N subset nonce fonts bucketing M custom glyphs from the source document, with a hideously complex fifty-case rewrite for all the p90 ways of mapping fonts in PDF (or is that 90 cases and p50?) to render the document in the editor. And then have to handle the actual editing cases, like what happens when your subset nonce font of a subset embedded font doesn't map any character to the keycode you just saw, and you want to try to give the user something with metrics sorta matching what they wanted instead of Helvetica or Times New Roman out of a naïvely constructed fontset. I may have worked with PDF in browsers one time too many, before. But the idea of using WASM to smuggle real tools into this impoverished environment actually makes a lot of sense to me...
contact9879 1y ago
I've been using a tangential but still pdf tool, pdfux.com since it was posted here on hn Thanks for this! I'll definitely add it to my bookmarks
TheJCDenton 1y ago
Very nice, thank you !
- philjohnson 1y ago
  you're welcome!
lutusp 1y ago
A voice in the wilderness, but weren't PDFs originally meant to be read-only? Yes, nearly everyone now has a PDF editor, but this seems to undermine the original intent behind the format. As things stand, we may need to invent a portable document format that remains read-only, that fills the purpose PDF was meant to fill.
yair99dd 1y ago
Inkscape!
neversettles 1y ago
Is anyone building 'Cursor for editing PDFs on the web'?
hakcermani 1y ago
Really neat. i tried a couple and it worked fine for my use case which is mainly adding a signature .. Any chance the signature size can be adjusted by dragging a corner ?
UE2020 1y ago
Some suggestions: Pen input (Apple Pencil) is quite choppy, because browsers tend to coalesce multiple pen events together, effectively reducing the pen's polling rate. You need to use PointerEvent.getCoalescedEvents: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/PointerEvent/getCoalescedEvents https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/PointerEven.... Pen pressure support would also make signatures look a lot better. Would also be nice to be able to draw anywhere you want. Right now I'm using Xournal++ for pdf annotation but its performance is lacking and I'm always looking for alternatives.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
denfromufa 1y ago
My wife hit a wall trying to upload a hefty PDF - every “shrink” tool we tried barely compressed the size, and some even made it larger! Frustrated by the state of PDF compressors (looking at you, Adobe), I turned to LLMs - Claude, Deepseek, and Gemini came up short, but OpenAI’s o4-mini saved the day with a perfect solution. That inspired me to build pdfmini: a tiny, open‑source, client‑side HTML app that crushes PDF sizes right in your browser!!! No installs, no fees, zero privacy worries - all your data stays on your machine. Try pdfmini now: https://den-run-ai.github.io/pdfmini/ https://den-run-ai.github.io/pdfmini/ Source code for pdfmini: https://github.com/den-run-ai/pdfmini https://github.com/den-run-ai/pdfmini
- 2Gkashmiri 1y ago
  This gave me an idea. You seem to be the right person to talk to. Here is my workflow. Have a bunch of PDFs and images I need to combine. I go to tools.PDF24.org, Merge pdfs, then compress them, then more compress them because of size limits, then add or remove pages. Then add page numbers. These are multiple steps. Could we have a way of defining these terms at start, either textual or no-code-like or something where we could define stuff like Take input, merge > compress with greyscale, Max size 1MB, add page numbers on bottom right Or Convert input to jpg with image size 8cm by 8cm I know many people who simply fail at such stuff. They just throw their hands up in defeat. Not saying we should have llms do the job but if we could have multiple actions so that people could tell the software what they have in mind. People dont just compress PDFs, often merge and then compress. I recently say pdfux.com but it is not as featureful as PDF24 but PDF24 crashes a lot.
  - Beijinger 1y ago
    #!/bin/bash # Convert images to PDF img2pdf *.jpg -o images.pdf # Merge PDFs pdfunite file1.pdf file2.pdf images.pdf merged.pdf # Compress gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \ -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=compressed.pdf merged.pdf # Remove unwanted pages (e.g., page 3) pdftk compressed.pdf cat 1-2 4-end output final.pdf # Add page numbers pdfjam final.pdf --outfile final_numbered.pdf --pagecommand '{}' --landscape
ugh123 1y ago
Is this open source? I think the world could use a good free and open 'utility' app for PDFs. Its hard to do digital business these days without even moderate features needed in PDF editing without paying Adobe or non-free online services - JUST TO EDIT A DOCUMENT.
- philjohnson 1y ago
  It's not open source at the moment, but I would consider it. Just have to think through it as once you go open-source it doesn't go over too well to go back. So, if I want to open source it, I want to be sure. I'm sure some might like to modify it, though I think probably most people aren't developers and wouldn't want to. There's no VCs or anything behind this, just me, and my costs are just a VPS to render the page, and all processing happens on the local device. So I have no reason to change any currently free features to ever not be free.
  - gaws 1y ago
    > It's not open source at the moment, but I would consider it. Just have to think through it as once you go open-source it doesn't go over too well to go back. So, if I want to open source it, I want to be sure. It's hard to trust your site's promise of "No uploads, 100% privacy guaranteed" when people can't audit the code.
    - philjohnson 1y ago
      Yes you can inspect it, just inspect source. Since everything runs in the browser, it's all inspectable.
- buccal 1y ago
  Not open source but free and works in Windows: PDFGear.
tanepiper 1y ago
Are you planning to open source or make a product? We're working with headless content solutions, and despite our best efforts to digitise everything - people on the floor still need physical copies of things. Hooking up a good PDF editor for output is hard, but this is a nice solution.
- philjohnson 1y ago
  No plans to open source at the moment, but I might consider it. I just added a Subscribe button to support further development of the software and get access to premium features. Which features (if any) that if added would you be willing to pay for?
  - tanepiper 1y ago
    Essentially templates, driven from a headless CMS with some ability to customise and print - instead of having to go to the headless CMS, or use some other tool to edit - in browser is nice. I've already looked at options but this is a build vs buy option.
    - philjohnson 1y ago
      Based on my understanding of what you're saying, here's my idea that I could build: You would add variables in the interface, and there would be a secure sandbox in the client where you can call the API of your headless CMS, and with an sdk you could create PDF programmatically assigning the respective variables with values from your headless CMS API response. Then a button to print them. This keeps everything fully private in the browser while automating the process. Would that work? For reference, what would you expect to pay for this if you wanted to go this route?
      - tanepiper 1y ago
        It's hard to give a price here, but essentially that's it - we already are doing the same with web templates with their live preview functionality. We have planning coming up, and I still need to see how high the priority is on this period
freeamz 1y ago
Doesn't seem to be working ATM: Console. Chrome based browser. Uncaught (in promise) wc: Input document to `PDFDocument.load` is encrypted. You can use `PDFDocument.load(..., { ignoreEncryption: true })` if you wish to load the document anyways.
- philjohnson 1y ago
  You're encountering this error if the document uploaded is encrypted. I previously supported it, but ran into issues re-encrypting the PDF when you download. I'll fix this soon so it is supported properly. In the mean time I'll handle encrypted documents more gracefully. Thanks for pointing the error out
torwag2 1y ago
So many smart people out there developing brilliant PDF tools—it's truly impressive! And yet... we still have billions of XFA-based form PDFs lurking in the shadows. Forgotten. Unopened. Untouched. Why? Because almost no tool can handle them. Where is the hero who will rise to the challenge? The one who will finally rescue thousands of office and admin workers from the endless misery of XFA hell—a nightmare Adobe created and then abandoned in a pit of form chaos years ago. Seriously, we need you. The world needs you. Be the one who ends the suffering. Be the legend.
worldsavior 1y ago
Why there aren't any PDF editors that support editing the actual PDF instead of adding on top of the PDF?
abanayev 1y ago
Cool! I would have expected a ton of things like this, but there really aren't. If it's free, though, who pays for your hosting?
- philjohnson 1y ago
  Me :) It runs on an very inexpensive VPS. There's no VCs or anything with this and since all processing happens on the users device, my costs won't really change at all. Still figuring out potential monetization. Is there anything you'd pay for?
patrick4urcloud 1y ago
very nice !
- philjohnson 1y ago
  thanks!
billyjobob 1y ago
Please don’t use the adjective “free” when describing proprietary software. We know you mean “free as in beer” but those outside our community may not and it may cause confusion over the meaning of free software.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  [flagged]
- enether 1y ago
  if anything, "free software" should change its wording (when referring to freedom/libre). there's no way you'll ever convince the masses who use software to not call it free or appeal to software that's advertised as "free".
jsomedon 1y ago
Any chance to open source this and allow us to host it privately? Fantastic work btw.
- philjohnson 1y ago
  Thanks! As of now I don’t plan on open sourcing. I think open sourcing software that I plan to monetize would create bad incentives. There are several companies of note that were very permissive early on with open source, and eventually after the product was built in large part by the community, they closed sourced it. I think it’s more honest to not open source it in the traditional sense, as there’s no chance of close sourcing a product that the community would have helped build for free. What I’m thinking at the moment, to fully answer your question, is to have a downloadable version for a fair, one-time price. As of now I think this approach provides the best balance between monetization and having full trust in the software and the ability to modify the software as you wish.
afranchuk 1y ago
For what it's worth, Firefox has had most of these features built into their PDF.js viewer for a while. I believe signatures were recently added. I'm not sure whether there's capability to remove pages or merge PDFs, though.
- rocketvole 1y ago
  pdf.js is also available as an extension on chromium based browsers. I've found that scrolling on pdfs on a high dpi screen using the built in chromium pdf reader is extremely laggy so this has always been a must-have extension for me.
wordglyph 1y ago
Great! On Android I couldn't get signature to work. It popped up but couldn't sign.
kengoa 1y ago
Great project! I'm also maintaining a fully in-browser data visualisation/analytics tool [1] and I often found it hard to convince people that their data isn't sent anywhere. It's funny I also say the exact same thing that they can inspect the Network tab. As a potential alternative to open-sourcing the codebase, maybe a desktop version of the same tool (i.e. an Electron app) could help address the privacy concerns if it explicitly states that it won't make network calls, although it's a perception problem rather than a technical one. [1]: https://docs.visprex.com/ https://docs.visprex.com/
- philjohnson 1y ago
  Thanks, and cool project you've built! Yeah, you're right on that it's perception problem rather than tech. It's interesting because it's much less intuitive to inspect the code/network requests for a desktop app which on it's face seems less transparent than something on the web, but the kicker is that there is no URL that you're accessing it from so it feels safer. I'm thinking now actually if I did a PWA? I think it has the psychological benefit of feeling of an offline desktop app (which it can function as), but is lightweight and less maintenance than an Electron app, while still having the benefit of automatically updating when I make improvements without needing to manually make updates. Where I'm struggling on the open-source question is that in the PDF use case most of them are not developers and don't know what open source is let alone host it lol. And most businesses can probably afford to pay a nominal fee to host it themselves and modify it if they wish, which many companies offer. It would be different if the product was something like a database or code package where it's always going to be a developer using it. While open source might actually have more "freedom" for people to modify it for free initially, in a way it can be more honest for a developer with any commercial intentions to not open source something while offering paid ways to modify the source code, as we're seeing more and more that companies start out with a very open source product that they then revert once the community has helped develop it. Not that it needs to happen that way, but with commercial aspirations one needs to be careful as something becomes popular, it becomes too tempting to take back once open-source parts. Forgive the wall of text here, I'm thinking out loud haha. Appreciate your comment!
  - 1y ago
chfritz 1y ago
Love the idea. However, there is no guarantee that the no-upload will not change. Which begs a question: wouldn't it be great if browsers provided a guaranteed "offline only" mode? Since they don't, I personally would prefer downloading this app as a standalone electron (or similar) app, or a docker container where I could disable Internet access.
- ironmanszombie 1y ago
  It's a great idea indeed. But the paranoid _like myself?_ would probably not recommend it as it runs on...well...a browser. I'm not at ease with the chance that a code change someday would / could allow a copy of my file to be uploaded anywhere. As for having the browsers run in "offline mode" (proxy equal 127.0.0 1?)...neat but I would vote against it. My fridge just needs to keep stuff cold, my toaster should serve bread, my Internet browser should not be an app.
- reyqn 1y ago
  You could use firefox containers to redirect a tab to localhost.
- philjohnson 1y ago
  Thanks! The "offline only" app could be a PWA where you can access if if you're offline but I could even enforce disabling network requests in the code itself. Seems like the most straightforward solution to me. Could even make updates opt-in. Would keep it lightweight and easily accessible for anyone. What do you think of this? Would you be willing to pay for this, or are certain features you'd be willing to pay for? Curious you're thoughts.
pryelluw 1y ago
Missing one important detail: the ability to add a table of contents by hand (or be it auto generated) with the additional ability to modify such table of contents if it exists.
koreanguy 1y ago
[dead]
RKFADU_UOFCCLEL 1y ago
I tested in Tor Browser at standard security level and it's blank except the thumbnails on the left show fine, so just a minor glitch somewhere is breaking it. I presume it doesn't support TOC then, which is a shame. On the upside, the signature feature is well appreciated, something sorely missing from most other PDF editors.
- philjohnson 1y ago
  Sorry about that. Would you mind sharing the console logs? Perhaps it's showing an error that I can use to debug and fix. Thanks!
  - RKFADU_UOFCCLEL 1y ago
    It will be easier for you to run Tor Browser yourself. TB is made to act exactly the same on all platforms.
stefnotch 1y ago
I noticed that this tool doesn't preserve links within PDFs. ( https://github.com/Hopding/pdf-lib/issues/341 https://github.com/Hopding/pdf-lib/issues/341 ) That's one of the main things I always try out with PDF editors, and it saddens me to see that this one also runs into that issue. Fixes would be either using a different PDF library, or manually implementing that feature with the building blocks that pdf-lib provides.
- philjohnson 1y ago
  Not sure if you're referring to external or internal links but external ones are indeed preserved when once you download the modified PDF. I've updated it so that external links are also clickable when viewing the PDF in the editor. Working on getting internal links to be clickable and function as well. Let me know if this fits what you're after
Saris 1y ago
Doesnt Firefox do this natively?
- philjohnson 1y ago
  Yeah there is currently a bit of overlap, but even with my software in it’s current state, it has password protecting a PDF, merging PDFs, reordering pages and adding input fields, all of which Firefox doesn’t have. And, I’m just getting started with this, lots more features to be imminently!
  - Saris 1y ago
    Nice, awesome to see more options out there!
  - bzmrgonz 1y ago
    As long as you are aware of projects like pdf24 and stirling pdf.
    - philjohnson 1y ago
      Yes, though both of those send documents to their server which might be a concern for some people. And most people working with PDFs wouldn't know how to setup stirling locally. BreezePDF doesn't send any data to the server, and for even further assurance, I'll be releasing the editor as a downloadable desktop version very soon.
8mobile 1y ago
Thank you for breezepdf, it is a beautiful idea. I am using it to create simple documents, do you foresee any new features? Like a table? That would be perfect.
- philjohnson 1y ago
  You’re welcome, and thanks for the kind words. Yes, lots of new features coming as well as a downloadable desktop version. A table is definitely something I will add! Thanks for the suggestion. Stay tuned!
neuroticnews25 1y ago
Photopea can also handle PDFs quite well. But not password protect them.
dailydetour123 1y ago
Thanks for making this, and making it freely available. I actually have a use case for your other product: pdfredactoronline.com as I need to redact personal info on job applications, and I'm delighted to have come across it in this thread. Thanks for solving a problem.
- philjohnson 1y ago
  I’m glad it can be of use!
  - dailydetour123 1y ago
    It's great, used it pretty extensively yesterday! My only request would be if there was a way to undo your last redaction (apologies if there is a way and I missed it). I found that if I got it wrong I had to refresh the page to start over. It's not a big deal though, and either way, it's a really good tool and I've recommended it be used as part of our internal recruitment process going forward. Thanks again!
lozzo 1y ago
Nice one. Since it's a Free in browser pdf editor, Why is it not on GitHub ?
- philjohnson 1y ago
  Thanks! It's not on GitHub because I don't desire for it to be redistributed by others. I will be releasing a downloadable desktop version (as a Progressive Web App) with even more features for a nominal one time payment. It makes the most sense to do it this way because having some monetization is good motivation to keep improving the product, while people still getting the benefits of running it completely locally. Besides, most people working with PDFs aren't developers who wouldn't be able to host it locally on their own.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
onlytrash 1y ago
Already using your tool and I really like it for the simplicity. Would you think an image OCR is a feasible feature?
- philjohnson 1y ago
  Glad to hear! Yes, OCR is definitely coming, though it'll be in the one-time payment downloadable version. I'm curious, what is your use case?
  - onlytrash 1y ago
    We have a position in accounting that gets all the delivery notes scanned. Usually there come many of them and they are not in order - or an order arrives over multiple different days. I played with your editor and used it to shift the the PDFs together that are from the same instance although collected over multiple weeks. I wished to be able to do search there. I could imagine we use this process in the future if searching is possible. It's not my task to DO it, but I like to introduce automation here wherever possible and also we really see the task getting easier / less prone to errors.
    - philjohnson 1y ago
      Got it, thanks for the explanation! When I add OCR I'll add the ability to search the OCR'd text within the document very soon when the downloadable version goes live. Stay tuned! I'll follow up in this thread once it's ready.

791 points by philjohnson 1y ago

Add text, input boxes, pictures, signatures, delete pages, merge PDFs and password protect them. All happening in the browser, 100% free and no sign-up.

behnamoh 1y ago

doesn't "edit" PDF text, just adds more.

philjohnson 1y ago
yes, that's why the description says "add text" not edit :) there aren't existing packages that can edit existing PDF text in the browser, but I'll do it myself sometime soon
- kwanbix 1y ago
  The website says: Edit PDFs Freely & Privately, Right in Your Browser.
wild_pointer 1y ago
That's the problem with all the pdf editors available out there. I guess adding stuff is much easier than editing existing stuff which you didn't add, and can be laid out in a gazillion ways, because PDF is a format for viewing and printing, not for editing. I had a period when I worked with lots of documents. I could only find one fairly decent PDF editor which deserves to be called that way. I could use it to open any PDF and delete an existing element, or change text in an existing field. Sometimes things behaved funny, for example a text field can have each letter in a separate block, but I assume the tool did what it could within reasonable effort. It worked fine for me overall.
- jbarrow 1y ago
  Editing text in PDFs is _really_ hard compared to other document formats because most PDFs don't really encode the "physics" of the document. I.e. there isn't a notion of a "text block with word wrapping," it's more "glyphs inserted at location X with font Y." If the PDF hasn't been made accessible, you have to do a lot of inferencing based on the layout about how things are grouped and how they should flow if you want to be able to make meaningful edits. Not impossible (Acrobat does it), but very challenging. It's part of the legacy of PDF as a format for presentation and print jobs, rather than typesetting.
  - benatkin 1y ago
    It's still what a PDF editor, as it says in the title, would do. With a quick Google I found one that I hadn't heard about before, and it let me edit some text and save it for free.
    - TechDebtDevin 1y ago
      Ask yourself, why would someone spend money on bandwidth for me to download something for free...
      - philjohnson 1y ago
        PDF editor is used as a broadly encompassing term. Yes, other tools can edit existing text, but they upload your PDF to their servers, so it's not private if that's something you care about. There isn't anything off the shelf that enables editing existing text in the browser, but it's something I'll build from scratch. So you'll be able to edit existing PDF text without compromising privacy.
        wild_pointer 1y ago
        This can if I remember correctly (can't check now), but it's a POC and not a finished product https://github.com/ShizukuIchi/pdf-editor https://github.com/ShizukuIchi/pdf-editor
  - otsukare 1y ago
    Yes, and alongside formatting challenges, PDFs commonly only include the glyphs from the font that are actually used in the document. So if you had PDF with "Hello World" on it, you could feasibly change it to "Hello Hello", but wouldn't be able to change it to "Goodbye World" (as the glyphs for "G", "b", "y", and "e" are not included in the PDF) Sure, you could do a bit of detective work to figure out which font it was from the glyphs or something and lookup and insert new glyphs into the PDF, but I can't imagine a generic PDF editor being capable of doing this for you. Some editors get around this but just straight up switching the font(s) for the whole PDF, so they'll look different after saving.
- layer8 1y ago
  PDF is really not a format designed for editing, of text content in particular. It’s only possible in limited circumstances.
- hnick 1y ago
  PDF was basically created as a final presentation format, it's essentially append-only by design, which is why you hear so often of redactions just marking up a white/black box over text. You can edit text streams, which needs a decompress/recompress, messes up all the object reference offsets for the entire file, potentially adds or removes characters to the subset font, which may not be referenced by the glyphs but a number instead to intentionally break copy/paste/scrape (e.g. 'a' is not 'a' in the text stream, but a random number), etc. Assuming the text is even marked up as strings, and not individually positioned characters with nested offset co-ordinate scaling to further muddy the waters. The fact so many people want to edit PDFs probably indicates a design flaw on Adobe's side, when considering what customers really want.
matsemann 1y ago
What I miss in free alternatives is the ability to redact. Not just by placing a black bar above, but such that the text also leaves the PDF. Shouldn't even need to reflow other text as mentioned in another comment, as things would otherwise stay the same.
- philjohnson 1y ago
  check out pdfredactoronline.com I also built that. I had to make it separate for now as it's using MuPDF JS library which has APGL licensing, but I might add it in here if it seems I can add it while still complying.
  - matsemann 1y ago
    Will check it out, thanks!

jdjdjdjdjd 1y ago

Seems broken to me. Uploaded a pdf but I cant scroll down to see the bottom of the pdf, its just stuck... tried with FF and safari, same deal.

philjohnson 1y ago
Fixed now!

a1371 1y ago

I like it! It has most of the features I need in a PDF doc and nothing of the bloat. The only features missing for me are: callout text comments, redact text, and flatten PDF. It's snappy and pretty easy to understand. Good job As much as I'd like it, we all know it can't remain "100% free and no sign-up". What's your plan to avoid enshitification?

philjohnson 1y ago
Thanks! Text comments, redaction and flattening are definitely features I'll add. One way it'll avoid enshitification is that I have no VCs or anything like that, it's just me. So I only answer to actual users. My hunch is that while PDF editing is something people commonly do, most people probably don't want to pay for it, at least for basic features. My plan is to add Google Adsense, but in a way that is non-obstructive/intrusive. Depending on feedback, I might add a paid plan for much more advanced features if there's demand. But all the features you mentioned that are missing, as well as all other basic features, will always remain free. Since all the editing happens in the browser, it's a win-win for privacy and lower resource utilization. I just have to render the webpage. It runs on a low cost VPS, so it costs me almost nothing to keep this software running. Given that, there's no current or future costs that would give any reason to remove free features.
- colesantiago 1y ago
  > One way it'll avoid enshitification is that I have no VCs or anything like that, it's just me. So I only answer to actual users. > My plan is to add Google Adsense, but in a way that is non-obstructive/intrusive. Please do not do Google ads. Not only that this ruins the privacy of the users and further entrances Google's reach, but it further leads to enshitification which is what we don't want. Perhaps maybe a small tiny sponsor banner may be better.
  - philjohnson 1y ago
    Fair point. I added a contact email in the upper right for feedback and sponsorship. Let's see what happens

moffkalast 1y ago

You'd think at this point there would be a dozen solid competitors to Adobe Acrobat. You'd really fuckin think so. And yet filling out a pdf and signing it with a certificate (aka the bog standard procedure for much of modern bureaucracy) is still too much to ask for any pdf software on linux. It just doesn't exist. How?

cbracketdash 1y ago
I use LibreOffice Draw
- crazygringo 1y ago
  Does that do a perfectly accurate import? Whenever I import PDF's into drawing programs, add something, and then export, something always seems to get messed up. Whether it's font glyphs, or font spacing, or something to do with layer ordering.
  - okanat 1y ago
    It doesn't except very trivial things.
- tap-snap-or-nap 1y ago
  Why did I never think of this? Thanks!
JLook 1y ago
I use Scribus to edit PDfs https://scribus.net https://scribus.net
- speerer 1y ago
  Weird: Your link is broken for me, but typing in exactly the same text to the address bar resolves perfectly. Is it somehow filtering out referrals from this site?

jbarrow 1y ago

Wonderful! Inserted form-fields show up in Preview and Acrobat, which is not a trivial task. I run a little AI-powered tool that automatically figures out where form fields should go (https://detect.penpusher.app https://detect.penpusher.app) and robustly adding form fields to the PDF was the hardest part. Fwiw, I do see the issue with being unable to scroll down across both Safari and Chrome.

philjohnson 1y ago
Thanks! I fixed the scrolling issue
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

cbracketdash 1y ago

Scrolling is broken. Also for modals, it'd be nice to be able to click anywhere on the screen to close it (or pressing Esc) rather than just pressing "cancel". Also for text, different fonts is a necessary requirement (and bolding, italics, underline, etc). Also, it seems like I can't edit text boxes after creating them... I can't even tell if I've selected the text box (an outline would be nice). Also the confirm modal for deleting a page is realllly annoying. You should just have it automatically delete the page and create an undo feature. (Basically store the original PDF, and store all the "actions" a user makes in an array, and then undo/redo the actions to the original pdf). Also the arrow to close the page overview on the left side of the screen is very unintuitive. Why does the entire page shift to the left? The only reason I'd use that feature is to see my centered page more clearly. On this topic, a zoom feature is super important too. Overall, the concept of a privacy-based PDF editor sounds really cool! Just note that for users to actually make a serious switch to this, you must at least match 1/4 of the quality of other PDF services like ilovepdf.com or smallpdf.com. Good luck!

philjohnson 1y ago
Scrolling is now fixed! And just updated so that if you click outside modal it closes. Working on update now so you can edit text you've already added. Agree with you regarding fonts, bolding underlining etc. and having instant page deletion with undo/redo. Will definitely be adding soon. Fixed the arrow closing the preview pane so that the page stays centered. I plan on adding a lot more features so that it's on par with ilovepdf.com and smallpdf.com. The libraries I'm already using support many of the features they have, so it'll be easy to add them while keeping everything fully in the browser. Thanks for the feedback!
- cbracketdash 1y ago
  You're very welcome! Thanks for building this out! I look forward to using it :)

nizarmah 1y ago

This is really nice! Kudos. Small request: When I have a document open, ask to prevent accidentally closing the tab. Large request: Resizing pictures and signatures.

philjohnson 1y ago
Thanks! Ask to prevent accidentally closing the tab is a great suggestion, I just added it! Resizing pictures and signatures is definitely something I'll add very soon.

speerer 1y ago

Nice work. I've been building something lately to manipulate PDFs in the browser for privacy, although it's quite a different use case. I think I see you're using pdf-lib and jspdf - both great libraries, and I'm using both, but: (1) Have you seen the recent WASM compilation of MuPDF? I am also using it for some functions and find it really excellent with accessible APIs and highly functional. Worth an try! (2) We chose different forks of the (unmaintained) pdf-lib - is there a reason you went with `pdf-lib-plus-encrypt`? I chose the cantoo fork, which seemed well-maintained to me - but I didn't research many others so would be interested to know if there is a good reason.

philjohnson 1y ago
(1) Yes, I am very familiar with the WASM compilation of MuPDF. It's got a lot of great features. I actually built another product pdfredactoronline.com that does redaction fully in the browser using the MuPDF WASM compilation. The reason I don't use it in BreezePDF is MuPDF has an APGL license which requires open-sourcing any code that uses their software. Which, I guess technically anything fully browser based is essentially open sourced :) so perhaps I could use it here. Since a lot of the basic functionality I've added so far is also covered by more permissible packages like the ones you mentioned, I've started out just using those. But thanks for bringing that up, I'll revisit using MuPDF for redaction and other features (2) I went with pdf-lib-plus-encrypt because the original pdf-lib doesn't have functionality for password-protecting PDFs, and since pdf-lib-plus-encrypt does, I used it so I could have that feature
- speerer 1y ago
  Thanks for the insight. Yes, the AGPL isn't a problem for me - I didn't check your licence as I could just view source :)
- sroussey 1y ago
  Is your code available?
  - what 1y ago

tbarbe 1y ago

I created a similar offline tool during covid because I didn't want to upload sensitive data to random servers, it's open source if that can be useful to someone else : https://timothebarbe.github.io/pdfModer https://timothebarbe.github.io/pdfModer (Im not a front end dev, the UI is not very good)

Labo333 1y ago

Nice! Recently I had the need for pdf censoring, aka not adding black rectangles but actually removing the content underneath and I still haven't found a suitable tool. Any recommendation? Or even python library to do it?

fortran77 1y ago
Do you want the black rectangle and the content removed? There are "redaction" tools. https://smallpdf.com/redact-pdf https://smallpdf.com/redact-pdf
- cbracketdash 1y ago
  This likely uploads your content to their servers
andrecarini 1y ago
Honestly, your best bet for securely erasing data from a PDF is by adding the black bars, printing it and then scanning the print.
- kmoser 1y ago
  You can bypass the messy printing step by just printing the PDF as an image, then import or OCR the image as a new document.
mamonoleechi 1y ago
you can do it easily with Inkscape which supports the pdf format
philjohnson 1y ago
I developed another tool pdfredactoronline.com that does this. Full redaction/removal of content, not just blacking out text. I didn't include it in this tool for now due to the APGL license of the library that enables the redaction, but since something fully in the browser is kinda open source already, I'll see if I can comply with the license while including it in BreezePDF

johnea 1y ago

Why would you want functionality like this to be in a browser? Isn't a browser for interfacing to http?

vntok 1y ago
This tool is hosted on a website, and you access that website like all other websites, using a browser interfacing with HTTP.
layer8 1y ago
The functionality isn’t actually in the browser, it’s in the files downloaded via HTTP.
- philjohnson 1y ago
  Yes, that's a good way of framing it. Though technically the files are executed in the browser. Will be releasing downloadable desktop version soon.
philjohnson 1y ago
It's accessible via a website so that you don't have to download anything, and everything running in your browser means the PDF never leaves your device, so it's 100% private.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  Not having to download anything is not a plus. Much better to make an actual application that you download, and which never touches someone else's server.

kzrdude 1y ago

Add a text block - it adds a block that wraps (it's a bit narrow, would like to change its size). When downloading the PDF, the text block is not wrapped, so it doesn't match the way it looks in the editor. Tested in Firefox (but it's the same in Chromium). Nice work on the interface and the offline & local way it works is very welcome!

philjohnson 1y ago
Hm, mind describing more about how it wraps? Assuming you're referring to text you added? I haven't encountered that myself, but will definitely try and fix. And thanks!
- kzrdude 1y ago
  Just that the text block after entering four-five words starts on a new line, it's like regular soft wrapping, looks like I get a 4cm wide text box to write into. Which is fine as a feature, only bug is the two items mentioned (can't resize it and doesn't show up in the pdf with the same width of the text box).
  - philjohnson 1y ago
    Wrapping fixed! So now it only goes to a new line if you hit enter, which is probably the best approach. So the text should render the same in the editor as it does when it downloads. Thanks for the feedback, and let me know if you run into any more issues!
    - kzrdude 1y ago
      Great, good luck with your project

ghostly_s 1y ago

What reason do I have to believe this will still exist in 3 months when I need it next?

philjohnson 1y ago
There's no VC backing behind this, it's just me. And it's actually a win-win to have all the PDF editing happen in the browser. It both offloads resource usage to a local computer and makes it private. All I have to do is render the page and that's it. Given that, it costs me almost nothing to keep it running, so there's no reason to take it down.

VisualByte 1y ago

Where is the repo? I do not trust the privacy...

philjohnson 1y ago
I might post the repo, but if you don't trust it you can just open the Network inspection tab and you'll see that zero network requests are made when you edit a PDF
- kmoser 1y ago
  You can also use "offline mode" in Dev Tools to ensure that tab doesn't send or receive network traffic. Then you don't have to sit there monitoring it.

VisualByte 1y ago

I do not trust the privacy here...

maxloh 1y ago
You can monitor Network requests the application made with DevTools.
cbracketdash 1y ago
All the requests made through DevTools seem to only load PDF scripts. I didn't detect any POST requests. Of course, there is no guarantee that this will remain... regularly checking network activity before uploading a private document isn't too hard

nestorD 1y ago

Nice! I will give it a try later today. For people who want a non web-based alternative, these days I use Xournal++ (https://xournalpp.github.io/ https://xournalpp.github.io/) to do that type of edition locally. What I am still looking for is a good way to clean scanned PDFs: split double pages, clean up text and make sure it is in lack and white, clean deformations and margin, cut and maybe rotate pages, compress the end result.

fiddlerwoaroof 1y ago
For splitting double pages, this is the best tool I’ve seen: https://github.com/mbaeuerle/Briss-2.0 https://github.com/mbaeuerle/Briss-2.0 For the other issues, I haven’t found any single good tool, but I’ve stitched together things like unpaper, ghostscript and deskew ( https://github.com/galfar/deskew https://github.com/galfar/deskew ). Also, if you need OCR, hocr-tools and Google’s Document AI ocr API have worked really well for me (I tried Gemini, but you run into issues with big documents).

kevinlinxc 1y ago

I use stirling-pdf for this, ran locally with docker run -d -p 8080:8080 -e DOCKER_ENABLE_SECURITY=false --name stirling-pdf frooodle/s-pdf:latest Lots of features, OP you should definitely check this out

theturtletalks 1y ago
Stirling is a life saver, they have a web UI too: https://stirlingpdf.io https://stirlingpdf.io
philjohnson 1y ago
Seems cool! Thanks for sharing. Even though it's MIT licensed it's written in Java, so unfortunately I can't borrow any code, but it's nice for inspiration.
nicce 1y ago
Official image seems to be "docker.stirlingpdf.com/stirlingtools/stirling-pdf:latest" BTW.

throwanem 1y ago

I tossed a legal document at it which was recently of passing interest to me, and it looks like embedded fonts still need some work. I'm not inclined to share a test case from what I have, which relates to a change of name and in any case was not really prepared by anyone especially competent when it comes to PDFs and their content; I tested with the first, facially void, version I was given. But it is possible I'll find more use for this tool, and if a shareable test case does come along then I'll do so. (And heaven knows with this document format, embedded fonts are a total nightmare always, even somehow in programmatic authoring. I'm not criticizing!) On a similar note, a downloadable (single-file HTML or so, although these days some kind of HTTP service is a practical necessity) version would be nice to have. Low pri even from my perspective; it isn't that I spend a lot of time in places with no cell signal, so much as just that tethering on an a la carte plan gets out of hand pretty quick, since applications aren't at all required to honor or even notice the existence of the "data saver" option. This is really neat! Thanks for posting it, I've bookmarked it for later use in the "just need a quick tweak" kind of case. I'll look forward to seeing how it develops!

wffurr 1y ago
Fonts on the web are super hard. There’s hardly any useful browser APIs for the kind of typesetting you need for PDFs: itemization, character bounding boxes, font file sub setting, etc. To solve or properly, you need to include a lot of code, e.g. all of harfbuzz compiled to wasm.
- throwanem 1y ago
  Well, that's the thing. Web fonts are hard. PDF fonts are super hard. Both at once is...actually maybe not hideous these days. Oh, I would not wish the task of devising such an algorithm, but the subset of vector fonts supported in PDF and that in browsers aren't totally disjoint, I think. Modern processors can handle the relevant conversion math without really waking from sleep, which will no doubt make it more frustrating when some W3C third party resource security model WG fistfight from 2013 makes it impossible to both construct and use a webfont on the client. (There may be some hideous blob URL magic, but those are length constrained so you could up in N subset nonce fonts bucketing M custom glyphs from the source document, with a hideously complex fifty-case rewrite for all the p90 ways of mapping fonts in PDF (or is that 90 cases and p50?) to render the document in the editor. And then have to handle the actual editing cases, like what happens when your subset nonce font of a subset embedded font doesn't map any character to the keycode you just saw, and you want to try to give the user something with metrics sorta matching what they wanted instead of Helvetica or Times New Roman out of a naïvely constructed fontset. I may have worked with PDF in browsers one time too many, before. But the idea of using WASM to smuggle real tools into this impoverished environment actually makes a lot of sense to me...

contact9879 1y ago

I've been using a tangential but still pdf tool, pdfux.com since it was posted here on hn Thanks for this! I'll definitely add it to my bookmarks

TheJCDenton 1y ago

Very nice, thank you !

philjohnson 1y ago
you're welcome!

lutusp 1y ago

A voice in the wilderness, but weren't PDFs originally meant to be read-only? Yes, nearly everyone now has a PDF editor, but this seems to undermine the original intent behind the format. As things stand, we may need to invent a portable document format that remains read-only, that fills the purpose PDF was meant to fill.

yair99dd 1y ago

Inkscape!

neversettles 1y ago

Is anyone building 'Cursor for editing PDFs on the web'?

hakcermani 1y ago

Really neat. i tried a couple and it worked fine for my use case which is mainly adding a signature .. Any chance the signature size can be adjusted by dragging a corner ?

UE2020 1y ago

Some suggestions: Pen input (Apple Pencil) is quite choppy, because browsers tend to coalesce multiple pen events together, effectively reducing the pen's polling rate. You need to use PointerEvent.getCoalescedEvents: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/PointerEvent/getCoalescedEvents https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/PointerEven.... Pen pressure support would also make signatures look a lot better. Would also be nice to be able to draw anywhere you want. Right now I'm using Xournal++ for pdf annotation but its performance is lacking and I'm always looking for alternatives.

deleted 1y ago

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denfromufa 1y ago

My wife hit a wall trying to upload a hefty PDF - every “shrink” tool we tried barely compressed the size, and some even made it larger! Frustrated by the state of PDF compressors (looking at you, Adobe), I turned to LLMs - Claude, Deepseek, and Gemini came up short, but OpenAI’s o4-mini saved the day with a perfect solution. That inspired me to build pdfmini: a tiny, open‑source, client‑side HTML app that crushes PDF sizes right in your browser!!! No installs, no fees, zero privacy worries - all your data stays on your machine. Try pdfmini now: https://den-run-ai.github.io/pdfmini/ https://den-run-ai.github.io/pdfmini/ Source code for pdfmini: https://github.com/den-run-ai/pdfmini https://github.com/den-run-ai/pdfmini

2Gkashmiri 1y ago
This gave me an idea. You seem to be the right person to talk to. Here is my workflow. Have a bunch of PDFs and images I need to combine. I go to tools.PDF24.org, Merge pdfs, then compress them, then more compress them because of size limits, then add or remove pages. Then add page numbers. These are multiple steps. Could we have a way of defining these terms at start, either textual or no-code-like or something where we could define stuff like Take input, merge > compress with greyscale, Max size 1MB, add page numbers on bottom right Or Convert input to jpg with image size 8cm by 8cm I know many people who simply fail at such stuff. They just throw their hands up in defeat. Not saying we should have llms do the job but if we could have multiple actions so that people could tell the software what they have in mind. People dont just compress PDFs, often merge and then compress. I recently say pdfux.com but it is not as featureful as PDF24 but PDF24 crashes a lot.
- Beijinger 1y ago
  #!/bin/bash # Convert images to PDF img2pdf *.jpg -o images.pdf # Merge PDFs pdfunite file1.pdf file2.pdf images.pdf merged.pdf # Compress gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \ -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=compressed.pdf merged.pdf # Remove unwanted pages (e.g., page 3) pdftk compressed.pdf cat 1-2 4-end output final.pdf # Add page numbers pdfjam final.pdf --outfile final_numbered.pdf --pagecommand '{}' --landscape

ugh123 1y ago

Is this open source? I think the world could use a good free and open 'utility' app for PDFs. Its hard to do digital business these days without even moderate features needed in PDF editing without paying Adobe or non-free online services - JUST TO EDIT A DOCUMENT.

philjohnson 1y ago
It's not open source at the moment, but I would consider it. Just have to think through it as once you go open-source it doesn't go over too well to go back. So, if I want to open source it, I want to be sure. I'm sure some might like to modify it, though I think probably most people aren't developers and wouldn't want to. There's no VCs or anything behind this, just me, and my costs are just a VPS to render the page, and all processing happens on the local device. So I have no reason to change any currently free features to ever not be free.
- gaws 1y ago
  > It's not open source at the moment, but I would consider it. Just have to think through it as once you go open-source it doesn't go over too well to go back. So, if I want to open source it, I want to be sure. It's hard to trust your site's promise of "No uploads, 100% privacy guaranteed" when people can't audit the code.
  - philjohnson 1y ago
    Yes you can inspect it, just inspect source. Since everything runs in the browser, it's all inspectable.
buccal 1y ago
Not open source but free and works in Windows: PDFGear.

tanepiper 1y ago

Are you planning to open source or make a product? We're working with headless content solutions, and despite our best efforts to digitise everything - people on the floor still need physical copies of things. Hooking up a good PDF editor for output is hard, but this is a nice solution.

philjohnson 1y ago
No plans to open source at the moment, but I might consider it. I just added a Subscribe button to support further development of the software and get access to premium features. Which features (if any) that if added would you be willing to pay for?
- tanepiper 1y ago
  Essentially templates, driven from a headless CMS with some ability to customise and print - instead of having to go to the headless CMS, or use some other tool to edit - in browser is nice. I've already looked at options but this is a build vs buy option.
  - philjohnson 1y ago
    Based on my understanding of what you're saying, here's my idea that I could build: You would add variables in the interface, and there would be a secure sandbox in the client where you can call the API of your headless CMS, and with an sdk you could create PDF programmatically assigning the respective variables with values from your headless CMS API response. Then a button to print them. This keeps everything fully private in the browser while automating the process. Would that work? For reference, what would you expect to pay for this if you wanted to go this route?
    - tanepiper 1y ago
      It's hard to give a price here, but essentially that's it - we already are doing the same with web templates with their live preview functionality. We have planning coming up, and I still need to see how high the priority is on this period

freeamz 1y ago

Doesn't seem to be working ATM: Console. Chrome based browser. Uncaught (in promise) wc: Input document to `PDFDocument.load` is encrypted. You can use `PDFDocument.load(..., { ignoreEncryption: true })` if you wish to load the document anyways.

philjohnson 1y ago
You're encountering this error if the document uploaded is encrypted. I previously supported it, but ran into issues re-encrypting the PDF when you download. I'll fix this soon so it is supported properly. In the mean time I'll handle encrypted documents more gracefully. Thanks for pointing the error out

torwag2 1y ago

So many smart people out there developing brilliant PDF tools—it's truly impressive! And yet... we still have billions of XFA-based form PDFs lurking in the shadows. Forgotten. Unopened. Untouched. Why? Because almost no tool can handle them. Where is the hero who will rise to the challenge? The one who will finally rescue thousands of office and admin workers from the endless misery of XFA hell—a nightmare Adobe created and then abandoned in a pit of form chaos years ago. Seriously, we need you. The world needs you. Be the one who ends the suffering. Be the legend.

worldsavior 1y ago

Why there aren't any PDF editors that support editing the actual PDF instead of adding on top of the PDF?

abanayev 1y ago

Cool! I would have expected a ton of things like this, but there really aren't. If it's free, though, who pays for your hosting?

philjohnson 1y ago
Me :) It runs on an very inexpensive VPS. There's no VCs or anything with this and since all processing happens on the users device, my costs won't really change at all. Still figuring out potential monetization. Is there anything you'd pay for?

patrick4urcloud 1y ago

very nice !

philjohnson 1y ago
thanks!

billyjobob 1y ago

Please don’t use the adjective “free” when describing proprietary software. We know you mean “free as in beer” but those outside our community may not and it may cause confusion over the meaning of free software.

carlosjobim 1y ago
[flagged]
enether 1y ago
if anything, "free software" should change its wording (when referring to freedom/libre). there's no way you'll ever convince the masses who use software to not call it free or appeal to software that's advertised as "free".

jsomedon 1y ago

Any chance to open source this and allow us to host it privately? Fantastic work btw.

philjohnson 1y ago
Thanks! As of now I don’t plan on open sourcing. I think open sourcing software that I plan to monetize would create bad incentives. There are several companies of note that were very permissive early on with open source, and eventually after the product was built in large part by the community, they closed sourced it. I think it’s more honest to not open source it in the traditional sense, as there’s no chance of close sourcing a product that the community would have helped build for free. What I’m thinking at the moment, to fully answer your question, is to have a downloadable version for a fair, one-time price. As of now I think this approach provides the best balance between monetization and having full trust in the software and the ability to modify the software as you wish.

afranchuk 1y ago

For what it's worth, Firefox has had most of these features built into their PDF.js viewer for a while. I believe signatures were recently added. I'm not sure whether there's capability to remove pages or merge PDFs, though.

rocketvole 1y ago
pdf.js is also available as an extension on chromium based browsers. I've found that scrolling on pdfs on a high dpi screen using the built in chromium pdf reader is extremely laggy so this has always been a must-have extension for me.

wordglyph 1y ago

Great! On Android I couldn't get signature to work. It popped up but couldn't sign.

kengoa 1y ago

Great project! I'm also maintaining a fully in-browser data visualisation/analytics tool [1] and I often found it hard to convince people that their data isn't sent anywhere. It's funny I also say the exact same thing that they can inspect the Network tab. As a potential alternative to open-sourcing the codebase, maybe a desktop version of the same tool (i.e. an Electron app) could help address the privacy concerns if it explicitly states that it won't make network calls, although it's a perception problem rather than a technical one. [1]: https://docs.visprex.com/ https://docs.visprex.com/

philjohnson 1y ago
Thanks, and cool project you've built! Yeah, you're right on that it's perception problem rather than tech. It's interesting because it's much less intuitive to inspect the code/network requests for a desktop app which on it's face seems less transparent than something on the web, but the kicker is that there is no URL that you're accessing it from so it feels safer. I'm thinking now actually if I did a PWA? I think it has the psychological benefit of feeling of an offline desktop app (which it can function as), but is lightweight and less maintenance than an Electron app, while still having the benefit of automatically updating when I make improvements without needing to manually make updates. Where I'm struggling on the open-source question is that in the PDF use case most of them are not developers and don't know what open source is let alone host it lol. And most businesses can probably afford to pay a nominal fee to host it themselves and modify it if they wish, which many companies offer. It would be different if the product was something like a database or code package where it's always going to be a developer using it. While open source might actually have more "freedom" for people to modify it for free initially, in a way it can be more honest for a developer with any commercial intentions to not open source something while offering paid ways to modify the source code, as we're seeing more and more that companies start out with a very open source product that they then revert once the community has helped develop it. Not that it needs to happen that way, but with commercial aspirations one needs to be careful as something becomes popular, it becomes too tempting to take back once open-source parts. Forgive the wall of text here, I'm thinking out loud haha. Appreciate your comment!
- 1y ago

chfritz 1y ago

Love the idea. However, there is no guarantee that the no-upload will not change. Which begs a question: wouldn't it be great if browsers provided a guaranteed "offline only" mode? Since they don't, I personally would prefer downloading this app as a standalone electron (or similar) app, or a docker container where I could disable Internet access.

ironmanszombie 1y ago
It's a great idea indeed. But the paranoid _like myself?_ would probably not recommend it as it runs on...well...a browser. I'm not at ease with the chance that a code change someday would / could allow a copy of my file to be uploaded anywhere. As for having the browsers run in "offline mode" (proxy equal 127.0.0 1?)...neat but I would vote against it. My fridge just needs to keep stuff cold, my toaster should serve bread, my Internet browser should not be an app.
reyqn 1y ago
You could use firefox containers to redirect a tab to localhost.
philjohnson 1y ago
Thanks! The "offline only" app could be a PWA where you can access if if you're offline but I could even enforce disabling network requests in the code itself. Seems like the most straightforward solution to me. Could even make updates opt-in. Would keep it lightweight and easily accessible for anyone. What do you think of this? Would you be willing to pay for this, or are certain features you'd be willing to pay for? Curious you're thoughts.

pryelluw 1y ago

Missing one important detail: the ability to add a table of contents by hand (or be it auto generated) with the additional ability to modify such table of contents if it exists.

koreanguy 1y ago

[dead]

RKFADU_UOFCCLEL 1y ago

I tested in Tor Browser at standard security level and it's blank except the thumbnails on the left show fine, so just a minor glitch somewhere is breaking it. I presume it doesn't support TOC then, which is a shame. On the upside, the signature feature is well appreciated, something sorely missing from most other PDF editors.

philjohnson 1y ago
Sorry about that. Would you mind sharing the console logs? Perhaps it's showing an error that I can use to debug and fix. Thanks!
- RKFADU_UOFCCLEL 1y ago
  It will be easier for you to run Tor Browser yourself. TB is made to act exactly the same on all platforms.

stefnotch 1y ago

I noticed that this tool doesn't preserve links within PDFs. ( https://github.com/Hopding/pdf-lib/issues/341 https://github.com/Hopding/pdf-lib/issues/341 ) That's one of the main things I always try out with PDF editors, and it saddens me to see that this one also runs into that issue. Fixes would be either using a different PDF library, or manually implementing that feature with the building blocks that pdf-lib provides.

philjohnson 1y ago
Not sure if you're referring to external or internal links but external ones are indeed preserved when once you download the modified PDF. I've updated it so that external links are also clickable when viewing the PDF in the editor. Working on getting internal links to be clickable and function as well. Let me know if this fits what you're after

Saris 1y ago

Doesnt Firefox do this natively?

philjohnson 1y ago
Yeah there is currently a bit of overlap, but even with my software in it’s current state, it has password protecting a PDF, merging PDFs, reordering pages and adding input fields, all of which Firefox doesn’t have. And, I’m just getting started with this, lots more features to be imminently!
- Saris 1y ago
  Nice, awesome to see more options out there!
- bzmrgonz 1y ago
  As long as you are aware of projects like pdf24 and stirling pdf.
  - philjohnson 1y ago
    Yes, though both of those send documents to their server which might be a concern for some people. And most people working with PDFs wouldn't know how to setup stirling locally. BreezePDF doesn't send any data to the server, and for even further assurance, I'll be releasing the editor as a downloadable desktop version very soon.

8mobile 1y ago

Thank you for breezepdf, it is a beautiful idea. I am using it to create simple documents, do you foresee any new features? Like a table? That would be perfect.

philjohnson 1y ago
You’re welcome, and thanks for the kind words. Yes, lots of new features coming as well as a downloadable desktop version. A table is definitely something I will add! Thanks for the suggestion. Stay tuned!

neuroticnews25 1y ago

Photopea can also handle PDFs quite well. But not password protect them.

dailydetour123 1y ago

Thanks for making this, and making it freely available. I actually have a use case for your other product: pdfredactoronline.com as I need to redact personal info on job applications, and I'm delighted to have come across it in this thread. Thanks for solving a problem.

philjohnson 1y ago
I’m glad it can be of use!
- dailydetour123 1y ago
  It's great, used it pretty extensively yesterday! My only request would be if there was a way to undo your last redaction (apologies if there is a way and I missed it). I found that if I got it wrong I had to refresh the page to start over. It's not a big deal though, and either way, it's a really good tool and I've recommended it be used as part of our internal recruitment process going forward. Thanks again!

lozzo 1y ago

Nice one. Since it's a Free in browser pdf editor, Why is it not on GitHub ?

philjohnson 1y ago
Thanks! It's not on GitHub because I don't desire for it to be redistributed by others. I will be releasing a downloadable desktop version (as a Progressive Web App) with even more features for a nominal one time payment. It makes the most sense to do it this way because having some monetization is good motivation to keep improving the product, while people still getting the benefits of running it completely locally. Besides, most people working with PDFs aren't developers who wouldn't be able to host it locally on their own.
- deleted 1y ago
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onlytrash 1y ago

Already using your tool and I really like it for the simplicity. Would you think an image OCR is a feasible feature?

philjohnson 1y ago
Glad to hear! Yes, OCR is definitely coming, though it'll be in the one-time payment downloadable version. I'm curious, what is your use case?
- onlytrash 1y ago
  We have a position in accounting that gets all the delivery notes scanned. Usually there come many of them and they are not in order - or an order arrives over multiple different days. I played with your editor and used it to shift the the PDFs together that are from the same instance although collected over multiple weeks. I wished to be able to do search there. I could imagine we use this process in the future if searching is possible. It's not my task to DO it, but I like to introduce automation here wherever possible and also we really see the task getting easier / less prone to errors.
  - philjohnson 1y ago
    Got it, thanks for the explanation! When I add OCR I'll add the ability to search the OCR'd text within the document very soon when the downloadable version goes live. Stay tuned! I'll follow up in this thread once it's ready.