7 ms·
Show HN: Pdfwithlove – PDF tools that run 100% locally (no uploads, no back end)
Most PDF web tools make millions by uploading documents that never needed to leave your computer.
pdfwithlove does the opposite:
1. 100% local processing
2. No uploads, no backend, no tracking
Features include merge/split/edit/compress PDFs, watermarks & signatures, and image/HTML/Office → PDF conversion.
- 2Gkashmiri 9mo agoOh cool. Can we add workflows to this? First merge all files then depending on output size compress to fit the size and other requirements? Or take out page 35, then compress rest Or extract page 2,5 and merge them and give me output withoit compress
- pratik227 9mo agoAh, cool idea. I’m currently integrating image processing features—crop, compress, and meme generation. Once that’s almost done, we can move on to integrating the workflow.
- psychoslave 9mo agoCan't you already do that with pdftk and the like? And work LLM, just like ffmpeg you can generally get the right command quiet easily now.
- 2Gkashmiri 9mo agoBut this is a self contained webapp. There are other tools that suppport similsr functionality
- psychoslave 9mo agoWell, fine if it helps other users. Not sure I’m the expected audience.
- mdotk 9mo agoI actually built a tool called FlowPDF - https://www.flowpdf.app/ https://www.flowpdf.app/ - specifically to solve this "logic" problem. I found that single-button tools were too limiting for things like "Merge -> Check Size -> Compress". It uses a node-based graph so you can literally string those steps together (e.g., Merge files -> Split out page 35 -> Compress the rest) and save it as a repeatable workflow.
- 2Gkashmiri 9mo agoWe don't have permission to read this file. Re-add it and allow access. DebugFILE_INPUT_FILE_PERMISSION · INPUT_FILE_PERMISSION · size=213517B · SecurityError: Security error when calling GetDirectory
- TZubiri 9mo agoFeels like infringing on the ILovePDF trademark. (Backpiggying on an established brand to make it look like you are affiliated, or the actual brand)
- pratik227 9mo agoAh, I’m not sure. I’m not directly using their name, and it’s not related, right? It shouldn’t cause any issues, correct?
- franze 9mo agowell you clearly state that your naming is based on their naming with this sentence "The Privacy-First Alternative to" even if it might not stand before court it is enough for a lawyer to write you a letter that is not 100% baseless.
- srikanthdotch 9mo agoLooking at the site, I don't think there's a legal issue
- Antibabelic 9mo agoDoesn't a time-tested solution already exist in the form of PDF24?
- pratik227 9mo agoIt's not just PDF i'm also working on image processing and all as well
- zdc1 9mo agoNice to have something that doesn't require Windows
- pratik227 9mo agothanks
- Antibabelic 9mo agoWorks under Wine very well.
- burgerone 9mo agoHow does it compare to stirling pdf?
- pratik227 9mo agoI’m doing everything locally, with no pricing on the extension for now. I do plan to make it paid later, but since all processing happens locally, your files never leave your device and remain completely safe. also not just PDF the image processing also WIP will be done by next week
- burgerone 9mo agoStirling pdf has launched a desktop version
- TZubiri 9mo agoMight be better to provide a downloadable executable instead of asking the user to trust that the browser isn't doing what the browser was designed to do.
- pratik227 9mo agoI plan to build a Chrome extension and am considering making it paid, around $2 for lifetime access. Also Desktop app is also good idea
- sabdarmdhn 9mo agoMake the Desktop Version natively, even tho its time efficient to make it just Electron
- pratik227 9mo agoyah noted I will do
- niemandhier 9mo agoExtensions have the downside that a malicious actor can buy out the original dev and start using them as an intrusion point.
- TZubiri 9mo agoUnlike websites?
- cluckindan 9mo agoDon’t make either unless you have the resources to support them. Anything paid is also a business process with tax implications. Local-only web apps are great one-off projects, but extensions and native apps require much more maintenance.
- ptspts 9mo agoIt's possible to run WebAssembly programs from the command line (without any GUI) using WASI (see e.g. https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI). Thus if the user downloads pdfconverter.wasi , and the user already has e.g. wasmtime installed, they can run `wasmtime pdfconverter.wasi input.pdf output.pdf` from the command line (see https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/blob/main/docs/WASI-tutorial.md https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime/blob/main/docs/... for details). In addition to the web site, the Electron app and the Chrome extension, you may want to distribute a command-line version of your tools as WASI-style .wasm program files. If you do so, I would exclusively use the them this way, from the command line.
- Bewelge 9mo agoGreat job! If it's all on client you should make a PWA out of it so it can be installed and used offline. Built a client only webapp myself and offline usage is the main thing users ask about.
- pratik227 9mo agoYeah, I’ll do that. I have a Chrome extension that I’m planning to make paid, and I may also release a desktop version. I’m thinking of pricing it cheaply—around $2 for lifetime access
- tonyedgecombe 9mo agoMy immediate thought is if it’s only $2 it can’t be very good.
- gregsadetsky 9mo agoGreat work, thanks for sharing and congrats on the launch! Very very small note - many clickable things on your site (the "explore" and "new task" buttons, the directory and blog links at the top, etc.) don't change the cursor to the css "cursor:pointer" (ie the clicky hand) You might want to add `cursor-pointer` to your tailwind <button> elements
- pratik227 9mo agoNoted I will fix it
- throwaway290 9mo agomakes it difficult to verify that it runs locally. unobfuscated source is not available. important actions, like open a PDF, save edited PDF, will be stuck or error if you cut the internet after opening the site and only unstuck after you reenable internet. I get it's probably for speed anyway, if you save the page in Chrome and serve it on a local server, it works even with internet disabled, so there's that.
- pratik227 9mo agoThanks for pointing this out. You’re right - some assets are currently loaded at runtime, which can cause actions to hang if the internet is cut mid-session. All PDF processing itself happens locally in the browser, and as you noticed, serving the page locally works fully offline. Improving offline behavior and making this easier to verify is on the roadmap
- Bigpet 9mo agoWas this done heavily LLM assisted? Especially the PDF Edit tools have user-interaction quirks and bugs that a human developer would catch immediately during the regular manual testing when developing. I'd suggest you at least try and mitigate that by having the LLM do extensive e2e testing if you aren't interested in using your own product.
- pratik227 9mo agoIt’s still a work in progress. I used an LLM to speed up development, and I’ve done the testing, but I’ll keep improving it no doubt
- jacquesm 9mo agoHow much of this is LLM derived and how much of it is yours?
- Bigpet 9mo agoI don't even care about that. My suggestion to him was earnest. I don't have a problem with LLMs. Just with how people use them. I just don't like "slop". I see the same user-interaction problems every time. I just don't want people to litter their heavily polished immaculately styled products that have so clearly bad user-interaction design. E2e testing and closing the loop on LLMs does seem to help here. Though I really would prefer people click around their own product for at least 5 minutes.
- jacquesm 9mo agoIt matters to me. Depending on the ratio there is a line between 'LLM assisted' and 'LLM derived'. There are enough samples of open source code around this theme out there that this could be one of either and the goal to commercialize it is a messy one if the provenance of the code isn't clear. It would be great to see this sort of thing litigated so that there is at least some clarity rather than just a moral stance.
- vunderba 9mo agoSeems like Clientside PDF editors are the new "hello world" app these days. From the last couple months on Show HN alone: Show HN: PDF Quick – Free PDF tools with 100% client-side processing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46094734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46094734 Show HN: A privacy-first, client-side toolbox (PDF, Imgs, Dev) no server uploads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46018221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46018221 Show HN: FileZen – Client-side PDF and Video tools using WebAssembly https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46339833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46339833 Show HN: JW Tool Box – Free, privacy-first web tools (PDF, Image, Converters) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46065448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46065448 Show HN: PDFClear – Browser-based PDF tools with local AI (WASM+Transformers.js) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46036944 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46036944 Show HN: Free PDF tools that run in the browser https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315672 Show HN: Client-side file tools – PDF, images, crypto, all in-browser https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209627
- pratik227 9mo agoDuring my college days, I used iLovePDF a lot, so I wanted to build an alternative to it. It’s not just about PDFs - I also have work in progress around image processing and related tools and Chrome Extetion as well
- vunderba 9mo agoSure, but if you just wanted a 100% client-side PDF tool, there are dozens of them in existence already. You can do as you like, but I don't think this is a particularly good use of your time, even with AI doing the majority of the heavy lifting. I guess what I'm saying is that "Swiss army knife multitool" apps are one of the lowest hanging LLM fruits, so don't be too surprised when you find that the tree has been stripped clean.
- flexagoon 9mo agoHalf of them also have a very obviously vibecoded front-end that looks exactly the same
- MoD411 9mo agowhat library are you using on the client side to convert from pdf to word?
- palla89 9mo agoSeeing it on GitHub I thought there was source code so that I can self-host it. Unfortunately that’s not the case :( Really nice project btw!
- pratik227 9mo agoThanks. After the recent incident with Tailwind around revenue and sustainability, it’s difficult to make this open source for now
- dboreham 9mo agoIt was always very hard to make money directly from open source. The Tailwind thing (incident??) was only notable in terms of its publicity. The fact that they thought they could make money from code the customer doesn't have to pay for is the incident perhaps?
- rho4 9mo agoI developed an aversion to "with love"-marketing. I've seen too many products come full circle from idealistic "ad-free-forever" "will-never-sell-your-data" "open-source-forever" "customer-first" student-times to selling out everything.
- NamlchakKhandro 9mo ago[flagged]
- pratik227 9mo ago[flagged]
- throwaway132448 9mo ago[flagged]
- pratik227 9mo ago“Sorry about that. Some people jump to conclusions about things they don’t fully understand. I’m just trying to build something useful and contribute to the community, but reactions like this can make it difficult
- throwaway132448 9mo agoYou’re not, you’re trying to elevate your own profile while having to learn or do as little as possible along the way in order to accomplish that. It’s very transparent in your methodology for this “contribution” and the language you use to talk about it. This is the opposite of a contribution.
- jacquesm 9mo agoIt sets you up for the inevitable rugpull, with love.
- 9mo ago
- NamlchakKhandro 9mo agoAll of these are already (and have already been available) for ages on linux
- dustypotato 9mo agoGimp and LibreOffice Draw come to my mind , also Photopea. Anything else ?
- Torwald 9mo agoGood work! I do like that the tools are task centric and that means I don"t have to handle all sorts of things, I just quickly learn the three to four tools that I really need (as a person working in the real world). #pareto Now, privacy, I love it! That "normal people" just store stuff in the cloud "it's on my phone", yeah ok, is one thing. It's another topic… But since Gmail came out and was all the rage in nerd circles, I am wondering why the people who understand the tech the most, are so eager to hand over their data to Big Tech and some other very questionable entities. Here's the thing in terms of money. If your app does put my data into the cloud, I am not going to use it. At all. Ever. If your app blesses me with a beautifully designed native GUI (or UI), instead of presenting itself in Electron slop to me, then I am already almost sold. Literally. I start to consider forking over some cash to you, dear developer of that beautifully designed, privacy respecting app. I do use my browser to browse the web. I am not interested in a "secondary OS architecture" where I have to play sys admin for a range of "apps" aka plugins. Neither Chrome plugins (I don't use Chromium based stuff.) nor Wordpress plugins, nor Emacs "modes" are going to replace well done native programs. You don't care enough about your project to provide a native program? Tells me, I shouldn't care either. Good buy. For a high school student who survives on an allowance, paying $39 for an app may be a bit much, but not for an adult with an income. Curation. A good maintained app store does all the "sys admin" stuff for me. No viruses, no weird installation procedures and so on. This is why that works. Hassle-free. Locally-run, native app, means beauty and privacy. I would pay for that. Happily. In fact, I have done so many times. The success of a plethora of developers with paid-for apps in the stores proves I am not the only one. And, btw, this is the distribution/commerce model that RMS always favoured. I quote RMS: > Since “free” refers to freedom, not to price, there is no contradiction between selling copies and free software. In fact, the freedom to sell copies is crucial: collections of free software sold on CD-ROMs are important for the community, and selling them is an important way to raise funds for free software development. Therefore, a program that people are not free to include on these collections is not free software. This is basically the app-store model. And I would pay, for the above stated reasons and I would be inclined to gulp an even higher price if the package has the "OSS inside" sticker on it. For personal reasons, right? Then there is one last thing. I don't want to have to create an account somewhere just to test-drive your app. Or to use it fully, later on. Privacy means, I don't have to be online in order to use the software. The end.
- manmal 9mo agoThere's a problem with i18n on the landing page, set my browser to German I see things like "home.alternative_title". Tbh I'm not sure such a site needs i18n at all, Claude was a bit overzealous there ;)
- pratik227 9mo agosorry for that will fix it
- renewiltord 9mo agoMacOS preview tool will do most of this.
- pratik227 9mo agoah ok but it's good for non-Mac users and Windows users right ?
- tonyedgecombe 9mo agoPreview is such an underrated tool.
- mateid 9mo agoMe and my buddy run a small indie dev studio, and a while back we got frustrated with how most PDF scanner apps feel — clunky UX, subscriptions everywhere, ads, and in some cases your documents get uploaded who-knows-where (for example, incidents reported leaks by TechRadar and Fox News). So we built our own PDF scanner & editor — lightweight, privacy-first, and (hopefully) not annoying to use. No ads, no subscriptions. Most features are free — a couple of advanced tools require a one-time unlock. All core features run 100% offline with on-device processing. The main features are built for everyday workflows: Scan documents — auto edge detect, live corner adjust, batch multi-page Fill and sign forms — reusable signatures, flatten for secure sharing OCR text recognition — preserves layout, searchable PDFs or clean text export (supports 18 languages, e.g., English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, etc.) Edit OCR-detected text — adjust or fix recognised text Page tools — reorder, rotate, duplicate, delete, extract pages Annotations and highlights — comments, text notes, custom watermarks Folder organization — custom folders, drag-and-drop move/rename Everything runs locally — no accounts, no tracking, no upload processing. You can download an AI model to your device (one-time download — it stays cached), and then: - ask questions about a document - summarise sections or chapters - extract key points or data - turn long documents into quick notes - After the model is installed, all Chat PDF processing happens fully offline on your device. The app is free to download, and most features are free (scanning, OCR, signatures, annotations, editing, etc). We wanted to keep the essential tools free, and only charge once for a few advanced features. We also put together a YouTube playlist with short feature walkthroughs. You can find the app here: https://apps.apple.com/ro/app/pdf-master-scan-edit-sign/id6751173174 https://apps.apple.com/ro/app/pdf-master-scan-edit-sign/id67... We’d really appreciate feedback — especially on the Chat PDF feature (usefulness, speed, UX, edge cases, things it should do better). If you try it and have suggestions, we’re actively improving the app based on user feedback.
- grimmzoww 9mo agoLooking for solo devs testing AI continuation tool which i have built and need honest feedback if it is usefull or garbage if you are intersted in checking out - DM me
- oliwarner 9mo ago> make millions How? Who? Most of them are freemium, so they're balancing resources funded by subscriptions against the majority free user usage. And is this local first (as it says on the website) or local only?
- pratik227 9mo agoILovePdf - $10–15M annually Smallpdf makes $20M+ per year
- KellyCriterion 9mo agowell, you just have to undercut Adobe Suite price by 50% and most people would buy your stuff: Most people mainly use only PDf merge & split & add comments & signing - and pay for this a monthly Adobe subscription of 29,99 USD last time I checked.
- bhasinanant 9mo agoI haven't used anything else since I've found PDFGear. Have it installed on all my devices. Still surprised it isn't more known.
- asimovDev 9mo agoHow does it fare with PDFs consisting entirely of images? Any PDF tool was struggling with compressing a passport scan (made with iPhone so might've contributed somehow, knowing Apple and PDFs) I had to cut down in size. Ended up using ImageMagick cause any Ghostscript based tool couldn't get it below 7 MBs from the original 28MB which, although, pretty good, was still too high and I could tell there was still plenty of detail that could be discarded without losing the eligibility of the document. I had to compress it with ImageMagick at the end, cut it down from 28MB to 3MB. Also does Adobe have some kind of patent/copyright on PDF forms? I don't think I saw any free tools that can edit fillable fields / tables in PDFs. I don't see any mention of forms in the Suite section of your app either. Is it just stupidly difficult / annoying to implement ?
- pratik227 9mo agoGood questions. Image-only PDFs (scans): These are the hardest case. If a PDF is basically high-res images (like iPhone scans), browser-based tools have limits compared to ImageMagick, which has much finer control over resampling and JPEG compression. Ghostscript-style pipelines help, but ImageMagick often wins if you’re willing to discard more detail. Improving this is on the roadmap, but it’s genuinely tough in-browser. PDF forms: Adobe doesn’t own forms, but editable PDF forms are extremely complex and poorly standardized. Many free tools avoid true form editing because it’s easy to break files. That’s why I haven’t enabled it yet—possible, just time-consuming and error-prone.
- ulfw 9mo agoI am old. Back in my day we called this... an app
- pratik227 9mo agoYes good Idea to create an app Let's do it
- grougnax 9mo agoThis is a scam made by AI. Avoid at all costs.
- pratik227 9mo agodon't think so
- qbane 9mo agoThe "source" link at the footer seems to point to the author's GitHub profile, not source repository. The repo under it contains no code either.
- pratik227 9mo agoAfter the incident with Tailwind CSS, I decided not to make this open source. Sponsorship has been zero since COVID, so it’s genuinely hard for open-source developers to sustain their work
- omnimus 9mo agoSorry don't take this personally but isn't this made with LLMs? Isn't the "incident with Tailwind" the problem that devs no longer support the project because they use it through LLMs often without knowing? I mean if i understand you are saying you won't release open source code because LLMs would feed/stole it. I get that position. But you are already feeding from the devs that were exploited. Seems a bit hypocritical to use LLMs if you have that stance.
- ValentineC 9mo agoYou have a nice website, and I noticed that it uses Tailwind too. Did you buy Tailwind Plus to support them?
- pratik227 9mo agoyes I have
- thangalin 9mo agoFor my hard sci-fi novel, I wanted people to give me feedback by annotating the PDF directly. Since I didn't know what local PDF editors they had available, I decided to vibe-code a web-based PDF annotation editor using PDF.js. (Yes, malicious users could have a field day by guessing the URLs.) It's pretty rough: https://repo.autonoma.ca/?action=repo&repo=notanexus.git&view=tree https://repo.autonoma.ca/?action=repo&repo=notanexus.git&vie... Basically, you drop a PDF onto your own web server. The web server serves up PDFs via PDF.js on the client. When the user highlights text to annotate it, the date, time, and text of all annotations in the document are pushed back to the server. As the author, when I reload the same PDF URL, I can add, review, modify, navigate through, or summarize the annotations just like a reader. Here's a screenshot with a funny comment one of my beta readers made: https://i.ibb.co/5gZMJ0qc/annotations.png https://i.ibb.co/5gZMJ0qc/annotations.png Beta readers wanted, see profile for contact!
- pppone 9mo agoI'm hoping one of these efforts will lead to local translation of PDFs. Anyone aware of one? Not local, but the best I've found is using Google Translate via camera/images.
- pratik227 9mo agoyah good Idea I will try to implelment it
- mdotk 9mo agoI've been working on exactly this with FlowPDF (https://www.flowpdf.app/ https://www.flowpdf.app/). It was a huge pain to find a tool that didn't rely on Google APIs. I integrated a local translation model. It downloads the model to your browser cache on the first run (so it's a bit heavy initially), but after that, you can OCR and translate documents 100% offline without uploading anything.
- p0w3n3d 9mo agoI wonder why everything now is written in web frameworks. Meanwhile I am currently using macos which has a magnificent PDF tool called... Preview. It allows annotate, merge, realign pages, insert one page from another document or even a JPEG-scan, etc. However, before the courtesy of my company giving me a macos-enabled gear - I had to cope with PDFs using multiple apps on Windows and Linux. Recently I got there again and found out that PDF support is really weak in Linux, and the formerly award winning Acrobat Reader now looks slow and poor, trying to steal my data and occupy as much space as possible. Also Acrobat Reader reference browser for linux is killed now. Hence, the question. If everyone is using PDF, why there are no good, fast native tools? and... why are we even staying with PDF?
- omnimus 9mo agoThere are many powerful native pdf tools but they are usually paid and you have to install them. Preview is ok but its only on mac. Preview also has only some of the features. These online converters are immensely popular for a reason. They also used to do everything serverside and had ads all around which is obviously terrible security wise. So having WASM versions is much better. Since these are link away they are easy to send and save. I help self-host a podcast and you need very particular settings for the export of the audio file. Instead of cooking up some automated solution, editors have bookmark of this https://ffmpeg-online.vercel.app/ https://ffmpeg-online.vercel.app/ with all the ffmpeg settings correctly selected and they can do the final file themselves for both their preview and production. Compare that to having multiple people with multiple platforms having to install and learn to use some gui app.
- dustypotato 9mo agoTested the edit feature on PDF and * it doesn't seem to select/edit existing components * Delete button doesn't work on a drawing * Insert text button doesn't work On Google Chrome. Am I the only one who tried this out?
- icar 9mo agoWhere I live, pretty much everyone uses iLovePdf: https://www.ilovepdf.com/ https://www.ilovepdf.com/ They have existed for years, way before LLMs ;)
- mattpogue 9mo agoI find Stirling to be one of the best ones out there. Open source and has been in development for a couple of years, at least - https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF/ https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF/
- trog 9mo ago+1. Bit nervous about their new pricing/licensing model but so far all the major stuff I use is in the OSS side.