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Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor

breezepdf.com

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Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor

#121

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

jbarrow wrote: post #13
wild_pointer wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem with all the pdf editors available out there. I guess adding stuff is much easier than editing existing stuff which you didn't add, and can be laid out in a gazillion ways, because PDF is a format for viewing and printing, not for editing. I had a period when I worked with lots of documents. I could only find one fairly decent PDF editor which deserves to be called that way. I could use it to open…

Editing text in PDFs is _really_ hard compared to other document formats because most PDFs don't really encode the "physics" of the document. I.e. there isn't a notion of a "text block with word wrapping," it's more "glyphs inserted at location X with font Y." If the PDF hasn't been made accessible, you have to do a lot of inferencing based on the layout about how things are grouped and how they should flow if you wa…

Sejda.com does it. Though its free one is severely crippled

Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor

#122

Post by throwanem »

gus_massa wrote: post #120
throwanem wrote: post #53

I tossed a legal document at it which was recently of passing interest to me, and it looks like embedded fonts still need some work. I'm not inclined to share a test case from what I have, which relates to a change of name and in any case was not really prepared by anyone especially competent when it comes to PDFs and their content; I tested with the first, facially void, version I was given. But it is possible I'll…

Emedded fonts only embed the used characters, so if ypu want to change "John" to "Mary" and there is no capital "M" elsewhere in the doccument, you are out of luck. Can this be your problem?

The mapping is incorrectly decoded and applied such that many characters for which glyphs are embedded and applied do not show them. It's a pretty common style of PDF mojibake, I think, and sometimes appears also with badly subsetted webfonts or "icon font" abortions if you disable page fonts in your browser settings.

Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor

#123

Post by LamaOfRuin »

philjohnson wrote: post #109
yusina wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, great tool! > trust That's exactly right. The main attractiveness of your tool comes from the "never leaves your browser", insinuating that other similar services do send your data to a server and then who-knows has access to your sensitive data. I really like that angle. But we don't know you. We can use some tools to check that nothing is transmitted today. But who knows about the future? Maybe you ch…

Thanks! > trust All fair points that you're making. I see no reason I would change my mind to send PDFs to the server, but I understand your concerns. If I'm reading in between the lines of what you're saying, that the way to alleviate these concerns is to make it open source? I think that's a compelling argument, but to play devil's advocate if most people realistically working with PDFs aren't developers and thus w…

>There is always a degree of trust you put in any company's software you use, and it's up to the company to be good stewards of that trust. If they break it, it's always bad for business anyways. But there is a point that if it was open source, those who have the desire to do so can continue using it without any concerns, which is fair.

I generally agree, but in this case you don't even have any meaningful identification on the site to say who created the software. I'm not sure how one can trust the creator of software if they won't even tell you who or what they are. Not even a pseudonym. There is no way to say that the person posting as philjohnson here is in fact the creator, or if the claimed copyright owner "Breeze PDF" is a legal entity that can own copyright.

As it is, with no source or identifying information, my default assumption if I happened upon this page would be that is is another one of the thousands of sites running FOSS software as a service with no added value or contribution back, but possibly also scanning every PDF it sees for bank/personal/tax/crypto information at which point it would decide to send that off to a server.

Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor

#124

Post by layer8 »

hnick wrote: post #77
layer8 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For similar reasons that no fully compatible MS Word clone exists: very high complexity of the format, underspecified format details, and undocumented implementation algorithms.

Even if the format is understood, it's also very much a case of Acrobat handling extremely badly formed PDFs instead of erroring out if it were strictly adhering. If you've ever seen a save prompt when making no changes, that happened. "It works on Acrobat" was something we got told a lot from clients sending us PDFs that were broken according to the official spec - we just had to deal with it.

Yes, and the same is true for MS Word. "Undocumented implementation algorithms" was meant to subsume that aspect.

Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor

#125

Post by KTibow »

philjohnson wrote: post #79
throwanem wrote: post #53

I tossed a legal document at it which was recently of passing interest to me, and it looks like embedded fonts still need some work. I'm not inclined to share a test case from what I have, which relates to a change of name and in any case was not really prepared by anyone especially competent when it comes to PDFs and their content; I tested with the first, facially void, version I was given. But it is possible I'll…

Thank you! I'll take a look at improving rendering embedded font support. And that's a neat idea to be able to download it for offline, I'll give some thought to that. Appreciate your feedback!

FYI - using service workers would automatically make it work offline and possibly be easier than trying to bundle it into one HTML file.

Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor

#126

Post by rocketvole »

afranchuk wrote: post #117

For what it's worth, Firefox has had most of these features built into their PDF.js viewer for a while. I believe signatures were recently added. I'm not sure whether there's capability to remove pages or merge PDFs, though.

pdf.js is also available as an extension on chromium based browsers.

I've found that scrolling on pdfs on a high dpi screen using the built in chromium pdf reader is extremely laggy so this has always been a must-have extension for me.

Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor

#128

Post by tanepiper »

philjohnson wrote: post #100
tanepiper wrote: post #99

Are you planning to open source or make a product? We're working with headless content solutions, and despite our best efforts to digitise everything - people on the floor still need physical copies of things. Hooking up a good PDF editor for output is hard, but this is a nice solution.

No plans to open source at the moment, but I might consider it. I just added a Subscribe button to support further development of the software and get access to premium features. Which features (if any) that if added would you be willing to pay for?

Essentially templates, driven from a headless CMS with some ability to customise and print - instead of having to go to the headless CMS, or use some other tool to edit - in browser is nice. I've already looked at options but this is a build vs buy option.

Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor

#129

Post by throwanem »

KTibow wrote: post #125
philjohnson wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! I'll take a look at improving rendering embedded font support. And that's a neat idea to be able to download it for offline, I'll give some thought to that. Appreciate your feedback!

FYI - using service workers would automatically make it work offline and possibly be easier than trying to bundle it into one HTML file.

Oh, that's an excellent point, especially since this is a perfect case for workers more broadly. I've had a bit of an app dev interregnum these last or postpandemic years; if service worker support has advanced that broadly, then that's wonderful news! Not especially surprising news, I suspect, but wonderful. Last I afforded close attention, the state of play for service workers in iOS Safari particularly was "don't bother."

Since I like an iPhone - or have thought at least they're least worst for 13 years and counting - you can probably imagine how this would have depressed my interest: Even though irrelevant here in that touchscreen PDF editing is an extremely hard problem and none I'd expect a solo dev to address, just knowing nothing I built with a worker I would myself be able to use, has made me not want to sink good time and effort into the topic at all. Best case that's all just wasted; worst case, it creates a dilemma I might not escape without a new regret.

Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor

#130

Post by philjohnson »

abanayev wrote: post #110

Cool! I would have expected a ton of things like this, but there really aren't. If it's free, though, who pays for your hosting?

Me :)

It runs on an very inexpensive VPS. There's no VCs or anything with this and since all processing happens on the users device, my costs won't really change at all.

Still figuring out potential monetization. Is there anything you'd pay for?

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