Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor

On the first part, since everything happens in the browser, anyone can see the html/javascript and inspect the Network tab and see that no network requests are made that send their PDF anywhere.

And on the second part, I think most people who use the software aren't developers and won't want to modify it, and I don't particularly see a use case for integrating this software into another one, outside maybe an internal corporate scenario.

Though, maybe I'll add something where you can pay to get the desktop version, similar to what Sejda does.

Pen input (Apple Pencil) is quite choppy, because browsers tend to coalesce multiple pen events together, effectively reducing the pen's polling rate. You need to use PointerEvent.getCoalescedEvents: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/PointerEven.... Pen pressure support would also make signatures look a lot better.

Would also be nice to be able to draw anywhere you want. Right now I'm using Xournal++ for pdf annotation but its performance is lacking and I'm always looking for alternatives.

Modern processors can handle the relevant conversion math without really waking from sleep, which will no doubt make it more frustrating when some W3C third party resource security model WG fistfight from 2013 makes it impossible to both construct and use a webfont on the client. (There may be some hideous blob URL magic, but those are length constrained so you could up in N subset nonce fonts bucketing M custom glyphs from the source document, with a hideously complex fifty-case rewrite for all the p90 ways of mapping fonts in PDF (or is that 90 cases and p50?) to render the document in the editor. And then have to handle the actual editing cases, like what happens when your subset nonce font of a subset embedded font doesn't map any character to the keycode you just saw, and you want to try to give the user something with metrics sorta matching what they wanted instead of Helvetica or Times New Roman out of a naïvely constructed fontset.

I may have worked with PDF in browsers one time too many, before. But the idea of using WASM to smuggle real tools into this impoverished environment actually makes a lot of sense to me...

Here is my workflow. Have a bunch of PDFs and images I need to combine.

I go to tools.PDF24.org, Merge pdfs, then compress them, then more compress them because of size limits, then add or remove pages. Then add page numbers.

These are multiple steps.

Could we have a way of defining these terms at start, either textual or no-code-like or something where we could define stuff like

Take input, merge > compress with greyscale, Max size 1MB, add page numbers on bottom right

Or

Convert input to jpg with image size 8cm by 8cm

I know many people who simply fail at such stuff. They just throw their hands up in defeat.

Not saying we should have llms do the job but if we could have multiple actions so that people could tell the software what they have in mind.

People dont just compress PDFs, often merge and then compress.

I recently say pdfux.com but it is not as featureful as PDF24 but PDF24 crashes a lot.

# Convert images to PDF

img2pdf *.jpg -o images.pdf

# Merge PDFs

pdfunite file1.pdf file2.pdf images.pdf merged.pdf

# Compress

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \ -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=compressed.pdf merged.pdf

# Remove unwanted pages (e.g., page 3)

pdftk compressed.pdf cat 1-2 4-end output final.pdf

# Add page numbers

pdfjam final.pdf --outfile final_numbered.pdf --pagecommand '{}' --landscape