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Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor

breezepdf.com

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

#21

Post by philjohnson »

matsemann wrote: post #16
behnamoh wrote: post #3

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

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.

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.

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

#22

Post by benatkin »

jbarrow wrote: post #13
wild_pointer wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 wa…

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.

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

#23

Post by philjohnson »

jbarrow wrote: post #9

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 ) 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.

Thanks! I fixed the scrolling issue

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

#24

Post by cess11 »

speerer wrote: post #20
JLook wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Scribus to edit PDfs https://scribus.net

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?

Looks like they have a cert for https://*.scribus.net, but not for https://scribus.net.

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

#25

Post by TechDebtDevin »

benatkin wrote: post #22
jbarrow wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

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.

Ask yourself, why would someone spend money on bandwidth for me to download something for free...

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

#26

Post by sgc »

speerer wrote: post #20
JLook wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Scribus to edit PDfs https://scribus.net

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?

Their link redirected to www.scribus.net for me, perhaps somebody saw this and fixed the config?

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

#27

Post by Labo333 »

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?

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

#28

Post by sgc »

moffkalast wrote: post #8

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?

The best I have found that does this is Master PDF Editor for Linux. Unfortunately not free or open source, but it is good.

https://code-industry.net/masterpdfeditor-help/certificate-m...

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

#29

Post by philjohnson »

cbracketdash wrote: post #10

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 mo…

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!

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

#30

Post by Propelloni »

moffkalast wrote: post #8

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?

Gnome's Papers and, of course, KDE's Okular sign PDF without a hassle. If you need to edit PDFs, too, MasterPDF [1] is a solid choice. Not quite PDF X-Change in power or Acrobat Pro in looks it is sufficient for daily tasks.

The real obstacle to digitally signing is bad support for Linux by the card reader vendors, as usual.

[1] https://code-industry.net/masterpdfeditor/

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