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Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

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Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#31

Post by layer8 »

adamnemecek wrote: post #10

I have not looked into this yet but can someone recommend an application for repairing pdfs? For example, I have PDFs where selecting text highlights a line above or below.

That doesn’t sound like the PDF is broken, just that it uses unusual font metrics or line displacements. Tools that could amend this are unlikely to exist.

More generally, the PDF format is too flexible to decide what is “broken” or really is as intended, in many cases. It’s l a bit like asking for a tool that repairs “broken” source code where it’s really just the business logic that is broken.

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#32

Post by RyanShook »

brailsafe wrote: post #23
RyanShook wrote: post #12

I have a PDF problem that I thought was simple but has proven difficult to solve and there is no paid solution I’ve found… I want to forward an email to an inbox, have the email body converted into a PDF, and then email that attachment to someone all automatically. I’ve tried Make, Zapier, pdf.co, pdftool, and a few other tools but have had no success. Has anyone solved this problem reliably?

Probably depends on the purpose of the pdf and why it needs to be an attachment, but I'd just skip all the steps and print the email since that's more or less what pdf is for. Print it and re-attach or just print at the destination.

This is what I currently do. I was just hoping to automate the process.

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#34

Post by RyanShook »

victorbojica wrote: post #17
RyanShook wrote: post #12

I have a PDF problem that I thought was simple but has proven difficult to solve and there is no paid solution I’ve found… I want to forward an email to an inbox, have the email body converted into a PDF, and then email that attachment to someone all automatically. I’ve tried Make, Zapier, pdf.co, pdftool, and a few other tools but have had no success. Has anyone solved this problem reliably?

If you are able to code or can ask someone, then you should be able to do it with some email api service (Nylas, AWS SES, etc) or headless client that gets the body of the email and convert it to pdf using wkhtmltopdf and then send it as attachment using the same service as before. Using low/no code tools might be very hard/unlikely

Thanks, yes I think this is the right direction. Surprised it doesn’t exist as SAAS, I guess demand isn’t there.

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#35

Post by qingcharles »

101008 wrote: post #18

I still couldn't find a tool for a difficult problem to solve. I have some magazines in PDF, with layouts in two columns, etc. I want them to be transformed into Markdown. I know, it should identify automatically the two columns, different layouts, etc. I am not desiring something perfect - I can fix if ther are some errors, but so far nothing has come with a good result.

This is a hard problem. Cut the PDF down so it's only the pages of the article you want and then try feeding it through GPT Pro or Claude?

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#36

Post by d4rkp4ttern »

I’ll join some other commenters, to add my favorite difficult pdf problem that I haven’t found a ready to use (even paid) solution for: extract key value pairs from a filled form such as this medical claims form:

https://imgur.com/a/EJDi7L7

There are two levels of difficulty: the starting file could be an image (pdf or png or jpg), which is the most difficult scenario. The slightly easier one is where it’s a text-based pdf so no OCR is needed.

I threw this as an image file at google form parser but it did poorly, I.e missed quite a few fields.

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#37

Post by Froodle »

karol wrote: post #16

Why can't this be an electron app?

Dev here, totally could, we dismissed it at first as electron is quite bulky containing a whole chromium instance inside the exe. instead we kept it small as possible for the exe version We have plans for a full UI version in V2. We are releasing V1 (SPDF is currently in beta) sometime this month. But have begun work on a V2 port to different language and framework.

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#38

Post by Froodle »

lordofgibbons wrote: post #26

How easy or difficult would it be to turn this into an electron app so that non-technical users can use it easily too?

Dev here, totally could, we dismissed it at first as electron is quite bulky containing a whole chromium instance inside the exe. instead we kept it small as possible for the exe version Truth is its not to hard to port to electron We have plans for a full UI version in V2. We are releasing V1 (SPDF is currently in beta) sometime this month. But have begun work on a V2 port to different language and framework.

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#39

Post by RyanShook »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #14
RyanShook wrote: post #12

I have a PDF problem that I thought was simple but has proven difficult to solve and there is no paid solution I’ve found… I want to forward an email to an inbox, have the email body converted into a PDF, and then email that attachment to someone all automatically. I’ve tried Make, Zapier, pdf.co, pdftool, and a few other tools but have had no success. Has anyone solved this problem reliably?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38545255 https://www.tapdone.com/ perhaps? Or something similar?

Thanks for sharing!

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#40

Post by jftuga »

rodlette wrote: post #2

Nice. I've been looking for something like this to self-host, to avoid my partner uploading sensitive documents to random PDF manipulation websites. Any better alternatives I should be considering?

A really nice, stand-alone command line tool is pdfcpu.

https://github.com/pdfcpu/pdfcpu

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