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Show HN: Pdfwithlove – PDF tools that run 100% locally (no uploads, no back end)

pdfwithlove.netlify.app

71–80 of 133 posts

Re: Show HN: Pdfwithlove – PDF tools that run 100% locally (no uploads, no back end)

#71
post #37

Seeing it on GitHub I thought there was source code so that I can self-host it. Unfortunately that’s not the case :( Really nice project btw!

Thanks. After the recent incident with Tailwind around revenue and sustainability, it’s difficult to make this open source for now

Re: Show HN: Pdfwithlove – PDF tools that run 100% locally (no uploads, no back end)

#73
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even care about that. My suggestion to him was earnest. I don't have a problem with LLMs. Just with how people use them. I just don't like "slop". I see the same user-interaction problems every time. I just don't want people to litter their heavily polished immaculately styled products that have so clearly bad user-interaction design. E2e testing and closing the loop on LLMs does seem to help here. Though I r…

It matters to me. Depending on the ratio there is a line between 'LLM assisted' and 'LLM derived'. There are enough samples of open source code around this theme out there that this could be one of either and the goal to commercialize it is a messy one if the provenance of the code isn't clear. It would be great to see this sort of thing litigated so that there is at least some clarity rather than just a moral stance…

So Claude Workspace is also written using the Claude LLM—does that mean you would stop using the product?

Re: Show HN: Pdfwithlove – PDF tools that run 100% locally (no uploads, no back end)

#74

> make millions How? Who? Most of them are freemium, so they're balancing resources funded by subscriptions against the majority free user usage. And is this local first (as it says on the website) or local only ?

ILovePdf - $10–15M annually Smallpdf makes $20M+ per year

Re: Show HN: Pdfwithlove – PDF tools that run 100% locally (no uploads, no back end)

#76
post #46

Good work! I do like that the tools are task centric and that means I don"t have to handle all sorts of things, I just quickly learn the three to four tools that I really need (as a person working in the real world). #pareto Now, privacy, I love it! That "normal people" just store stuff in the cloud "it's on my phone", yeah ok, is one thing. It's another topic… But since Gmail came out and was all the rage in nerd ci…

Thanks for feedback

Re: Show HN: Pdfwithlove – PDF tools that run 100% locally (no uploads, no back end)

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half of them also have a very obviously vibecoded front-end that looks exactly the same

So if a platform is vibe-coded, it suddenly has no value? When the Spotify founder vibe-codes an app, it’s praised—but when an open-source contributor like me does it, it’s seen as a bad thing? That doesn’t seem fair

Where is the source then?

Re: Show HN: Pdfwithlove – PDF tools that run 100% locally (no uploads, no back end)

#78

How does it fare with PDFs consisting entirely of images? Any PDF tool was struggling with compressing a passport scan (made with iPhone so might've contributed somehow, knowing Apple and PDFs) I had to cut down in size. Ended up using ImageMagick cause any Ghostscript based tool couldn't get it below 7 MBs from the original 28MB which, although, pretty good, was still too high and I could tell there was still plenty…

Good questions.

Image-only PDFs (scans): These are the hardest case. If a PDF is basically high-res images (like iPhone scans), browser-based tools have limits compared to ImageMagick, which has much finer control over resampling and JPEG compression. Ghostscript-style pipelines help, but ImageMagick often wins if you’re willing to discard more detail. Improving this is on the roadmap, but it’s genuinely tough in-browser.

PDF forms: Adobe doesn’t own forms, but editable PDF forms are extremely complex and poorly standardized. Many free tools avoid true form editing because it’s easy to break files. That’s why I haven’t enabled it yet—possible, just time-consuming and error-prone.

Re: Show HN: Pdfwithlove – PDF tools that run 100% locally (no uploads, no back end)

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It matters to me. Depending on the ratio there is a line between 'LLM assisted' and 'LLM derived'. There are enough samples of open source code around this theme out there that this could be one of either and the goal to commercialize it is a messy one if the provenance of the code isn't clear. It would be great to see this sort of thing litigated so that there is at least some clarity rather than just a moral stance…

So Claude Workspace is also written using the Claude LLM—does that mean you would stop using the product?

That's whataboutism, we're not discussing Claude Workspace, we're discussing 'Pdfwithlove' so you are avoiding answering the question.

Re: Show HN: Pdfwithlove – PDF tools that run 100% locally (no uploads, no back end)

#80
post #47

There's a problem with i18n on the landing page, set my browser to German I see things like "home.alternative_title". Tbh I'm not sure such a site needs i18n at all, Claude was a bit overzealous there ;)

sorry for that will fix it
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