I do not trust the privacy here...
You can monitor Network requests the application made with DevTools.
Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
41–50 of 188 posts
Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
#42Where is the repo? I do not trust the privacy...
I might post the repo, but if you don't trust it you can just open the Network inspection tab and you'll see that zero network requests are made when you edit a PDF
Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
#43doesn't "edit" PDF text, just adds more.
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…
PDF is really not a format designed for editing, of text content in particular. It’s only possible in limited circumstances.
Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
#44What reason do I have to believe this will still exist in 3 months when I need it next?
There's no VC backing behind this, it's just me. And it's actually a win-win to have all the PDF editing happen in the browser. It both offloads resource usage to a local computer and makes it private. All I have to do is render the page and that's it. Given that, it costs me almost nothing to keep it running, so there's no reason to take it down.
Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
#45Why would you want functionality like this to be in a browser? Isn't a browser for interfacing to http?
The functionality isn’t actually in the browser, it’s in the files downloaded via HTTP.
Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
#46You'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?
For similar reasons that no fully compatible MS Word clone exists: very high complexity of the format, underspecified format details, and undocumented implementation algorithms.
Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
#47Why would you want functionality like this to be in a browser? Isn't a browser for interfacing to http?
It's accessible via a website so that you don't have to download anything, and everything running in your browser means the PDF never leaves your device, so it's 100% private.
Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
#48Nice! I will give it a try later today.
For people who want a non web-based alternative, these days I use Xournal++ (https://xournalpp.github.io/) to do that type of edition locally.
What I am still looking for is a good way to clean scanned PDFs: split double pages, clean up text and make sure it is in lack and white, clean deformations and margin, cut and maybe rotate pages, compress the end result.
Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
PDF editor is used as a broadly encompassing term. Yes, other tools can edit existing text, but they upload your PDF to their servers, so it's not private if that's something you care about.
There isn't anything off the shelf that enables editing existing text in the browser, but it's something I'll build from scratch. So you'll be able to edit existing PDF text without compromising privacy.
Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
#50Nice! I will give it a try later today. For people who want a non web-based alternative, these days I use Xournal++ ( https://xournalpp.github.io/ ) to do that type of edition locally. What I am still looking for is a good way to clean scanned PDFs: split double pages, clean up text and make sure it is in lack and white, clean deformations and margin, cut and maybe rotate pages, compress the end result.
For splitting double pages, this is the best tool I’ve seen: https://github.com/mbaeuerle/Briss-2.0
For the other issues, I haven’t found any single good tool, but I’ve stitched together things like unpaper, ghostscript and deskew ( https://github.com/galfar/deskew ).
Also, if you need OCR, hocr-tools and Google’s Document AI ocr API have worked really well for me (I tried Gemini, but you run into issues with big documents).