Live data from Hacker News

PDF Tool – Modify PDFs in the browser without uploading

pdftool.org

171–180 of 198 posts

Re: PDF Tool – Modify PDFs in the browser without uploading

#171
post #134

Semi related: I have been looking far and wide for a tool that replicates Acrobat's /fill and sign/ feature, allowing me to fill out NON-form-fillable PDFs. Something where I can fill it out, save, and then open up later to edit and add/remove previous additions. Adobe as a business, their pushiness about creating an account and the fact that they bundle McAfee's shitware with Acrobat never sat well with me, so I'd l…

FoxIT's free PDF reader[0] has a Fill & Sign feature. And, it also allows you to type text anywhere on a PDF, in case that's what you actually want.

It's available for PC, Mac and Linux. (While the Linux version isn't as full-featured, I'd expect/hope all the versions have these 2 features...though I see that the feature-matrix on their website shows the Linux version doesn't have the Form Filling feature that the other versions have, FWIW, so it might lack one or both of the features I've mentioned).

The Fill-and-Sign feature is accessible from the Home tab -- there's a tool right end of the ribbon called "Fill & Sign".

The text-typing feature is also accessible from the Home tab: you choose the Typewriter tool from the ribbon, move the cursor where you want the text to show up, click there, then start typing -- the text will show up in a faint box (which disappears when you e.g. click somewhere else).

Later, you can click the Typewriter's arrow cursor on the text and the box will reappear -- you can then delete the box and its text, if you like, or you can double-click inside the box and get a text-cursor, which you can use to delete/add text.

I've used the Typewriter a bunch -- it works pretty well. (I think I've used Fill & Sign in the past, but not as often).

[0] https://www.foxit.com/pdf-reader/

Re: PDF Tool – Modify PDFs in the browser without uploading

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d have read that just like you did. More context always helps. I guess another (lengthy) way to write that - can be - “I just created my HN account to post this comment”.

The green username on hackernews + the username itself was decent context.

[deleted]

Re: PDF Tool – Modify PDFs in the browser without uploading

#174
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You do not believe us? We know that websites on the internet promise a lot of stuff. You can try our promise by yourself. Load the webpage, disable your internet connection and start editing PDFs. You are gonna be surprised.

Technically the app can cache files and phone home the next time we connect to internet i guess? Not aware of how WASM works. Not paranoid but just want to know if this tool can be downloaded once and run from browser forever -- without having to disable internet. Does it not generate any network traffic at all - zero - even when there is internet connectivity available? Whether to the home domain or otherwise? Even…

> Not paranoid but just want to know if this tool can be downloaded once and run from browser forever -- without having to disable internet.

You can turn off Internet for a single tab through Chrome's dev tools. F12, Network, change from "No throttling" to "Offline." Would be a bit annoying to do each time you use the app though.

Unfortunately not aware of a quick easy way to cut off Internet to a single tab in Firefox, but if you're fine temporarily killing Internet access to the entire browser (all tabs), you can do Alt > File > Work Offline. With the keyboard shortcuts (Alt > F > K) it's actually very fast to do.

It would be nice though if you opened a local .html file if it by default was cut off from accessing the Internet until it asked for and was granted permission by the user, much like GPS, webcam and mic use are. Would be much more convenient than the two options above (which require you to remember to do that each time you use the app.)

Re: PDF Tool – Modify PDFs in the browser without uploading

#175
post #17

Big fan of the idea of offline in-browser tools: works on any device, and "installing" the program is as simple as visiting a webpage or opening the saved HTML file. This one uses WebAssembly, but even that isn't necessary: I wrote a couple of PDF tools for my own use that simply use pdf-lib: https://shreevatsa.net/pdf-pages/ https://shreevatsa.net/pdf-unspread/

I also love the idea. However it's really hard to trust as a non IT person who understands that's possible and how to verify (via dev tools for example) that it's truly working offline.

I'm not really sure what the solution is, but I'd love to be able to navigate to a site like that and know that it's not uploading my files somewhere, without having to take your word for it.

Re: PDF Tool – Modify PDFs in the browser without uploading

#176
post #139
post #134

Semi related: I have been looking far and wide for a tool that replicates Acrobat's /fill and sign/ feature, allowing me to fill out NON-form-fillable PDFs. Something where I can fill it out, save, and then open up later to edit and add/remove previous additions. Adobe as a business, their pushiness about creating an account and the fact that they bundle McAfee's shitware with Acrobat never sat well with me, so I'd l…

Xournal++ does the job, with a recognizably 90s interface. It stores a separate file with the overlay you create, and can produce a new PDF which combines the original file with your overlay. I use it any time I need to do something official.

To me, at a first glance the interface looks like more like ~2005-2007 ;-)

Re: PDF Tool – Modify PDFs in the browser without uploading

#177
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not understand why Microsoft still does not offer something similar to macOS’s Preview app.

They kind of do. You can add signatures to pdfs with edge, oddly enough.

... soon enough Microsoft will put the system settings and Notepad inside Edge, to convince users they need to use it... ;-)

Re: PDF Tool – Modify PDFs in the browser without uploading

#179

The lack of a good PDF editor in Linux has always seemed strange to me, considering the relative frequency of "fiddle with a PDF" tasks like splicing pages and so on. Sure you can do it with Pdftk (or stapler these days), and a mish-mash of pdfinfo, Imagemagick and so on but the GUI programs mostly seem pretty bad offerings considering they're a fairly thin shell around library operations.

IMO the reason PDF tools are bad on linux has a lot to do with history.

Per Wikipedia, PDF is a standard that was originally developed by Adobe. It was a proprietary standard for ~15 years before it became an open standard.

Nowadays, the relationship between Adobe and PDF is like Google and Chromium. Other PDF tools are playing catch up, but it’s en enormous amount of tedious work that mist would only do for a good paycheck, which is hard to find outside of Adobe.

Post reply on HN