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Seems 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 w
by vunderba 10mo ago
Seems 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo agoHalf of them also have a very obviously vibecoded front-end that looks exactly the same
- greggsy 10mo agoThey’re created to offer functional outcomes. If they’re doing so in a friendly interface then I’m cool with that
- flexagoon 10mo agoSure, if they're tested well enough that there are no obvious UX issues (which is usually not the case) It's just that there's zero effort put into them so they don't really offer anything of value. If you write a todo list-tier app, it would be completely useless to most people, but it's a learning project for you. If you vibecoded a todo list-tier app, it's completely useless to most people including yourself.
- pratik227 10mo agoSo if a platform is vibe-coded, it suddenly has no value? When the Spotify founder vibe-codes an app, it’s praised—but when an open-source contributor like me does it, it’s seen as a bad thing? That doesn’t seem fair
- lukaslukas 10mo agoGood point! I don't understand why this link received so many points.
- jacquesm 10mo agohttps://incentius.com/ https://incentius.com/
- sieste 10mo agoDue to pdf popularity there is a lot of demand for pdf processing tools. And the format is so complex that there are many nontrivial and creative ways to do pdf processing. That's why these "Hello World" projects usually make Top 5 on HN, and one of the upvotes is usually from me.
- forgotpwd16 10mo ago>many nontrivial and creative ways to do pdf processing They're all wrapping PDFlib and provide the same functionality.
- sam_lowry_ 10mo agoI am already well served by ghostscript, GIMP, Imagemagick, etc: Optimize PDF: #!/bin/bash INPUT="$1" OUTPUT="$(mktemp --suffix=.pdf)" gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \ -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile="$OUTPUT" "$INPUT" mv "$OUTPUT" "$INPUT" Merge PDF: #!/bin/sh gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \ -dCompatibilityLevel=1.3 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \ -sOutputFile=merged.pdf "$@" And so on and so forth. Moreover, I see a webapp and I immediately assume everything I do in this app is exfiltrated and abused. I can check that the webapp advertised above is indeed local-first, but I can't be 100% sure they don't steal my data in a way I did not foresee, e.g. via websockets or cookies. Because I learnt this the hard way by being on Instagram and Gmail.
- ptspts 10mo agoYour commands to process PDF with Ghostscript are lossy (they lose lots of metadata and in minor ways they also change how the PDF renders), and they produce very large PDF files.
- x3ro 10mo agoCan you expand on why the produced PDF files are supposed to be larger than the originals? I've not observed that yet.
- forgotpwd16 10mo agoNot even couple of months. Just within last month. All with similar design, similar implementation, similar HN post. Literally AI slop. Also: Show HN: BentoPDF is a privacy first PDF Toolkit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46657892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46657892 (this one just yesterday) Show HN: NoUploadTools – Free Tools that don't upload your files https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46516400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46516400 Show HN: TechRex – client-side PDF editor (no upload, no watermark) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45611498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45611498
- bambax 10mo agoAlso, PdfTk has existed for decades and is very solid (but Windows only, I think).
- mdotk 9mo agoYou're right, the market is flooded with simple "button grid" apps. That saturation is actually why I built FlowPDF. I didn't want another list of basic tools; I wanted to chain them. I built a node-based editor so you can create actual pipelines (Merge -> OCR -> Filter -> Compress) rather than just doing one-off tasks. I think that's the only way to actually add value over the 50 other "Hello World" clones. https://www.flowpdf.app/ https://www.flowpdf.app/ if you wanna check it out!