very cool. Do you think you could hot link the PDF spec of each element for the casual observer?
Show HN: PDF Debugger – Inspect Structure of PDF Files
11–20 of 27 posts
Re: Show HN: PDF Debugger – Inspect Structure of PDF Files
#12An example output would have been nice. There is also nothing about privacy and stuff. What happens to the uploaded pdf? Or is it processed inside the browser? But then there could still be a call to a back end?
You can get an example output by clicking the "try example PDF file" link.
Re: Show HN: PDF Debugger – Inspect Structure of PDF Files
#13Very interesting. I'm dealing with a lot of PDF generation at work using pdf-lib so this could come in handy. Thanks for the share!
Re: Show HN: PDF Debugger – Inspect Structure of PDF Files
#14very cool. Do you think you could hot link the PDF spec of each element for the casual observer?
Yeah, definitely it going to my todo list
Re: Show HN: PDF Debugger – Inspect Structure of PDF Files
#15An example output would have been nice. There is also nothing about privacy and stuff. What happens to the uploaded pdf? Or is it processed inside the browser? But then there could still be a call to a back end?
Uploaded PDF is fully processed inside a browser. I use Posthog analytics, so there are definitely requests to analytics sever
Re: Show HN: PDF Debugger – Inspect Structure of PDF Files
#16So I don't know what your intended audience was but there are elements of this that would be handy for people trying to trouble check PDFs for Print on Demand projects. I'm going to repost the link to a few groups I am in that do this sort of work. Definitely not for everyone but it might be handy for some.
Re: Show HN: PDF Debugger – Inspect Structure of PDF Files
#17That's very cool! 1. Is the source available anywhere? I'm curious to see how it works. 2. Is there a way to connect the structure displayed here, to the rendered version in the PDF? To visually display the subcomponents?
I haven't decided if I want to create an open-source version. In the first place, I made it private to worry less about my code quality and to finish the product faster before I lose interest in it. It heavily relies on the core part of PDF.js: I've made a fork of the PDF.js project, removed everything not related to the core part, and added an export for low-level primitives [1]. Also, as inspiration, I used the pdf…
Very nice work.
I wouldn't worry about the quality of the code. You get better by seeing other people's work and seeing alternative solutions to the problems you had.
Also, as I mentioned in another comment, this could easily be built into a quick trouble-checking app for POD work. Posting it would also let people fork it to make more task-specific apps.
Re: Show HN: PDF Debugger – Inspect Structure of PDF Files
#18I needed this last night when I was trying to edit some text in a PDF and I ended up having to use iText Rups to browse the tree.
Is there a way to view the stream content in ASCII/Unicode instead of Base64/Hex?
Re: Show HN: PDF Debugger – Inspect Structure of PDF Files
#19Re: Show HN: PDF Debugger – Inspect Structure of PDF Files
#20I needed this last night when I was trying to edit some text in a PDF and I ended up having to use iText Rups to browse the tree. Is there a way to view the stream content in ASCII/Unicode instead of Base64/Hex?
Thanks for the idea. I added this feature a few minutes ago [1]. I'm trying to convert stream content to UTF-8. Maybe later, I will add a more flexible solution to convert to other encodings.