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Show HN: BreezePDF – Free, in-browser PDF editor

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Show HN: BreezePDF – Free, in-browser PDF editor

#1

Post by philjohnson »

BreezePDF lets you edit, sign, merge, compress, redact, OCR, fill forms, extract tables, and use 30+ more PDF tools — all in the browser, no sign-up. Files never leave your computer.

I built it because when people search Google for common PDF tasks, many of the tools they find upload documents to a server. I wanted an option that keeps files local instead.

I posted an earlier version on HN last spring: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43880962

At the time it only supported a small set of features. Over the last 10 months I rebuilt large parts of it and expanded it to nearly 40 tools, including several ideas that came from comments in that earlier thread.

There is also now a desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux, plus a CLI/SDK for developers.

Show HN: BreezePDF – Free, in-browser PDF editor
breezepdf.com

Re: Show HN: BreezePDF – Free, in-browser PDF editor

#4

Post by k310 »

This may be outside your plan, but I really could use a pdf editor that makes Internet Archive book scans more readable.

Apparently, the scanner(s) adopt some compromise setting that renders halftones OK, but gives all text a "dishwater gray" background.

If there are few pictures, I run the PDF through a quartz filter in Preview to threshold the text and later merge graphics pages with the "contact sheet" view from an un-threshold-ed image in Preview.app. This is slow and tedious.

Of course, computers are "smart," so they tell me, and should be able to recognize a picture from a block of text on the same page and render each one appropriately.

I used to do such editing of really important documents (like ads for pioneer computer products and gizmos like GENIAC and such)[0] pretty much by hand, splitting a PDF, if needed, into multiple images and hand/batch editing, then merging again.

I could use ImageMagick ... but it's not adaptive, as described above.

Geniac ad sample (imgbb.com)

[0] https://i.ibb.co/67zpBDgh/OIP-2472099845.jpg

Re: Show HN: BreezePDF – Free, in-browser PDF editor

#6

Post by philjohnson »

npilk wrote: post #5

Some discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47555636

Yes, yesterday's post got marked as duplicate because I didn't reference the previous post from last year. I got permission from the HN moderator tomhow to repost it again with the reference to last year's post.

Re: Show HN: BreezePDF – Free, in-browser PDF editor

#7

Post by philjohnson »

k310 wrote: post #4

This may be outside your plan, but I really could use a pdf editor that makes Internet Archive book scans more readable. Apparently, the scanner(s) adopt some compromise setting that renders halftones OK, but gives all text a "dishwater gray" background. If there are few pictures, I run the PDF through a quartz filter in Preview to threshold the text and later merge graphics pages with the "contact sheet" view from a…

Neat idea. Basically an "Enhance Readability" button. I'm looking into how it can be done, will report back.

Re: Show HN: BreezePDF – Free, in-browser PDF editor

#10

Post by philjohnson »

philjohnson wrote: post #3
intoXbox wrote: post #2

Nice tool. I like the local approach. I think a nice feature would be to remove all PII from documents, so that users can redact PDFs and upload to their favourite LLM.

Good suggestion! I'll look into implementing that.

I made a first version of it if you want to check it out! It's under the "markup" tab
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