71–80 of 188 posts
Why 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
PDFs are final produce of a rendering process. They don't have nice text or image elements you can move around as a unit. The rendering process explodes the source material into thousands of unconnected objects. Fonts are separated into their glyphs so you need to have legal access to a bunch of very expensive fonts to just to write the correct heuristics. You need good algorithms to reverse the layout and even reverse engineer entire documents to rearrange text content. It is stupidly expensive to develop in and hire for this niche. So nobody will release their very expensive heuristics in the wild.
Btw, closed-source alternatives to Acrobat exist. I like Tracker Software's editors a lot. There is also Foxit and Master PDF. The latter two work under Linux but their UI can be janky since they ship their own UI libraries.
Nice work. I've been building something lately to manipulate PDFs in the browser for privacy, although it's quite a different use case. I think I see you're using pdf-lib and jspdf - both great libraries, and I'm using both, but: (1) Have you seen the recent WASM compilation of MuPDF? I am also using it for some functions and find it really excellent with accessible APIs and highly functional. Worth an try! (2) We ch…
(1) Yes, I am very familiar with the WASM compilation of MuPDF. It's got a lot of great features. I actually built another product pdfredactoronline.com that does redaction fully in the browser using the MuPDF WASM compilation. The reason I don't use it in BreezePDF is MuPDF has an APGL license which requires open-sourcing any code that uses their software. Which, I guess technically anything fully browser based is e…
doesn'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…
You can edit text streams, which needs a decompress/recompress, messes up all the object reference offsets for the entire file, potentially adds or removes characters to the subset font, which may not be referenced by the glyphs but a number instead to intentionally break copy/paste/scrape (e.g. 'a' is not 'a' in the text stream, but a random number), etc. Assuming the text is even marked up as strings, and not individually positioned characters with nested offset co-ordinate scaling to further muddy the waters.
The fact so many people want to edit PDFs probably indicates a design flaw on Adobe's side, when considering what customers really want.
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?
For similar reasons that no fully compatible MS Word clone exists: very high complexity of the format, underspecified format details, and undocumented implementation algorithms.
"It works on Acrobat" was something we got told a lot from clients sending us PDFs that were broken according to the official spec - we just had to deal with it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
(1) Yes, I am very familiar with the WASM compilation of MuPDF. It's got a lot of great features. I actually built another product pdfredactoronline.com that does redaction fully in the browser using the MuPDF WASM compilation. The reason I don't use it in BreezePDF is MuPDF has an APGL license which requires open-sourcing any code that uses their software. Which, I guess technically anything fully browser based is e…
Is your code available?
I tossed a legal document at it which was recently of passing interest to me, and it looks like embedded fonts still need some work. I'm not inclined to share a test case from what I have, which relates to a change of name and in any case was not really prepared by anyone especially competent when it comes to PDFs and their content; I tested with the first, facially void, version I was given. But it is possible I'll…
I'll take a look at improving rendering embedded font support. And that's a neat idea to be able to download it for offline, I'll give some thought to that. Appreciate your feedback!