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PDF Tool – Modify PDFs in the browser without uploading
181–190 of 198 posts
Re: PDF Tool – Modify PDFs in the browser without uploading
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ;-)
Oh yeah, they did get an overhaul recently. Thanks for the reminder!
Re: PDF Tool – Modify PDFs in the browser without uploading
#183shout out to another tool someone promoted at HN earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34722432 (https://pdfux.com/)
i've used it for basic things and had a positive experience thus far.
Re: PDF Tool – Modify PDFs in the browser without uploading
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because they used web technologies to put together the program?
My point is, why would you install and run a web service locally when you could just install a native PDF app?
Well if you could sure; but you would still want to see what the app does I guess.
Without the source, you can't trust binary blobs. That was just a reflection why people want the source.
Re: PDF Tool – Modify PDFs in the browser without uploading
#185For Mac users, most of these things can be done in the default Preview.app
In the most unintuitive ways possible.
Page deletion: select the page from the sidebar and press the delete key
Page addition: drag a page from another PDF sidebar into the Preview sidebar
Merging: same, but for a whole PDF
Encryption: File > Edit Permissions > Require Password to Open Document
Decryption: If you have the password, then the same flow
Redaction/Markup/Signatures: All from the Markup menu
Re: PDF Tool – Modify PDFs in the browser without uploading
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm going to need a bug tracker link for that, it seems to dumb to be true. Surely they would just not use HTTP/3 if they can't do it through the configured proxy. I wouldn't bet my life on it though, I have seen dumber bugs. edit: tested this the old-fashioned way with Firefox 116.0.3 on Ubuntu and nginx 1.25.1. Firefox does connect over HTTP 3 and CORRECTLY DOESN'T CONNECT AT ALL with a (bad) proxy configured. You…
> Surely they would just not use HTTP/3 if they can't do it through the configured proxy. That's what I thought, at first. But, back when Chrome introduced QUIC, this was a known phenomenon in proxy-restricted but not-UDP restricted setups. I doubt I'd be able to find a bug report for it, given Google's nature, but there's a few reports[1][2][3] by proxy vendors asking for QUIC to be disabled or traffic will go throu…
Your links point to people and services using intercepting proxies, not configuring one in their browsers. Techniques intercepting TCP traffic and redirecting it to a proxy will not work when the traffic is UDP. This is not a browser issue.
In this thread we were talking about the user willingly configuring a proxy in the browser or OS.
Re: PDF Tool – Modify PDFs in the browser without uploading
#187Big 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.
Software that does not run in the browser can do even worse things (that are not possible in a browser): it could access (and upload) arbitrary files other than just the PDF file(s) you gave it access to, it could set up things that stay running even after you close it (like a virus or keylogger), etc — so you need to verify/trust the developer or run it inside a sandbox, and the same is true for in-browser software. At least with a browser, the tools needed for monitoring and disabling network access (dev tools) are built-in to the browser (e.g. don't have to separately install Little Snitch).
One thing that seems worse with software-on-a-webpage is the risk of malicious behaviour getting added later (this is also possible with non-browser software with automatic "updates"): you could mitigate it, if you trust or have verified one particular version of such a webpage, by saving the HTML file (put it in a Dropbox folder say) and opening the file (maybe with network disabled), whenever you need to use it. But then you lose the advantage of "don't have to install anything"; it's a trade-off.
Re: PDF Tool – Modify PDFs in the browser without uploading
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Surely they would just not use HTTP/3 if they can't do it through the configured proxy. That's what I thought, at first. But, back when Chrome introduced QUIC, this was a known phenomenon in proxy-restricted but not-UDP restricted setups. I doubt I'd be able to find a bug report for it, given Google's nature, but there's a few reports[1][2][3] by proxy vendors asking for QUIC to be disabled or traffic will go throu…
Your links point to people and services using intercepting proxies , not configuring one in their browsers. Techniques intercepting TCP traffic and redirecting it to a proxy will not work when the traffic is UDP. This is not a browser issue. In this thread we were talking about the user willingly configuring a proxy in the browser or OS.
> Your links point to people and services using intercepting proxies, not configuring one in their browsers.
Sorry, I didn't look too closely through any of those links, because I never used those specific products myself.
But I do clearly remember this being an issue for me back in the day. So I dug further. You'll be happy to see this bug report[1] and this commit[2]. Note these words from a Chromium dev: "This code was written when we discovered a problem with QUIC bypassing proxies."
1: Issue 389684: QUIC bypasses proxy settings | https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=389684
2: Issue 217783003: Do not use QUIC for requests that are through a proxy. | https://codereview.chromium.org/217783003
Re: PDF Tool – Modify PDFs in the browser without uploading
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious if you have some sample PDFs that are problematic. I'm not doubting you, it's just that I would love to forward them on the the team at Apple that maintain Preview so they can determine what the issue is and address it. Since CoreGraphics on MacOS has fairly rich PDF support, Preview can do some degree of PDF manipulation: reorder pages, delete pages, insert pages, rotate, crop, annotate, etc.
Clarified: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37113679 > Ah I see what you mean, I was talking more about “editing” in the sense being able to fill all kinds of form entry and edit them and other text. > For example, I want to have a “check” in a form by clicking, not by dragging an “X” onto the box.
Yeah, "form handling" is something of an esoteric case that is difficult to fully support (well, easy if you're Adobe, I suppose).
Maybe, fortunately, most PDFs I consume are the reading kind.
Re: PDF Tool – Modify PDFs in the browser without uploading
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clarified: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37113679 > Ah I see what you mean, I was talking more about “editing” in the sense being able to fill all kinds of form entry and edit them and other text. > For example, I want to have a “check” in a form by clicking, not by dragging an “X” onto the box.
Yeah, "form handling" is something of an esoteric case that is difficult to fully support (well, easy if you're Adobe, I suppose). Maybe, fortunately, most PDFs I consume are the reading kind.
That’s perfectly fair. But in that case, I’d argue Preview is not much better than the umpteen other apps that can do non-form editing.