Thanks for making this, and making it freely available. I actually have a use case for your other product: pdfredactoronline.com as I need to redact personal info on job applications, and I'm delighted to have come across it in this thread. Thanks for solving a problem.
Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
161–170 of 188 posts
Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
#162Nice work. I've been building something lately to manipulate PDFs in the browser for privacy, although it's quite a different use case. I think I see you're using pdf-lib and jspdf - both great libraries, and I'm using both, but: (1) Have you seen the recent WASM compilation of MuPDF? I am also using it for some functions and find it really excellent with accessible APIs and highly functional. Worth an try! (2) We ch…
(1) Yes, I am very familiar with the WASM compilation of MuPDF. It's got a lot of great features. I actually built another product pdfredactoronline.com that does redaction fully in the browser using the MuPDF WASM compilation. The reason I don't use it in BreezePDF is MuPDF has an APGL license which requires open-sourcing any code that uses their software. Which, I guess technically anything fully browser based is e…
Weird that a google search for "pdf redact online" or "pdf redactor online" doesn't show your site in the first page.
Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
#163Doesnt Firefox do this natively?
Yeah there is currently a bit of overlap, but even with my software in it’s current state, it has password protecting a PDF, merging PDFs, reordering pages and adding input fields, all of which Firefox doesn’t have. And, I’m just getting started with this, lots more features to be imminently!
Nice, awesome to see more options out there!
Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
(1) Yes, I am very familiar with the WASM compilation of MuPDF. It's got a lot of great features. I actually built another product pdfredactoronline.com that does redaction fully in the browser using the MuPDF WASM compilation. The reason I don't use it in BreezePDF is MuPDF has an APGL license which requires open-sourcing any code that uses their software. Which, I guess technically anything fully browser based is e…
Weird that a google search for "pdf redact online" or "pdf redactor online" doesn't show your site in the first page.
Hopefully it will soon, the site is brand new :)
Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
#165My wife hit a wall trying to upload a hefty PDF - every “shrink” tool we tried barely compressed the size, and some even made it larger! Frustrated by the state of PDF compressors (looking at you, Adobe), I turned to LLMs - Claude, Deepseek, and Gemini came up short, but OpenAI’s o4-mini saved the day with a perfect solution. That inspired me to build pdfmini: a tiny, open‑source, client‑side HTML app that crushes PD…
Well so I glanced at what that project does.
Congratulations, you've managed to "compress" PDF files by rasterizing every page to JPEG, while destroying all the vector and textual information in it.
The resulting PDF is nothing like the input -- it's just a bunch of blurry JPEG images wrapped in a PDF format.
You can't search or copy the text, and trying to print it will just make a blurry mess of the text.
Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
#166Thanks for making this, and making it freely available. I actually have a use case for your other product: pdfredactoronline.com as I need to redact personal info on job applications, and I'm delighted to have come across it in this thread. Thanks for solving a problem.
I’m glad it can be of use!
Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
#167I tested in Tor Browser at standard security level and it's blank except the thumbnails on the left show fine, so just a minor glitch somewhere is breaking it. I presume it doesn't support TOC then, which is a shame. On the upside, the signature feature is well appreciated, something sorely missing from most other PDF editors.
Sorry about that. Would you mind sharing the console logs? Perhaps it's showing an error that I can use to debug and fix. Thanks!
It will be easier for you to run Tor Browser yourself. TB is made to act exactly the same on all platforms.
Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on my understanding of what you're saying, here's my idea that I could build: You would add variables in the interface, and there would be a secure sandbox in the client where you can call the API of your headless CMS, and with an sdk you could create PDF programmatically assigning the respective variables with values from your headless CMS API response. Then a button to print them. This keeps everything fully…
It's hard to give a price here, but essentially that's it - we already are doing the same with web templates with their live preview functionality. We have planning coming up, and I still need to see how high the priority is on this period
Got it. The functionality that your after is something I'm definitely considering. It could have broad applications.
I'm curious where you land on this after planning, would it be okay to follow up? You can send me a note through the contact form on the BreezePDF homepage or let me know the best way to get in touch. Cheers
Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just that the text block after entering four-five words starts on a new line, it's like regular soft wrapping, looks like I get a 4cm wide text box to write into. Which is fine as a feature, only bug is the two items mentioned (can't resize it and doesn't show up in the pdf with the same width of the text box).
Wrapping fixed! So now it only goes to a new line if you hit enter, which is probably the best approach. So the text should render the same in the editor as it does when it downloads. Thanks for the feedback, and let me know if you run into any more issues!
Great, good luck with your project
Re: Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor
#170I use stirling-pdf for this, ran locally with docker run -d -p 8080:8080 -e DOCKER_ENABLE_SECURITY=false --name stirling-pdf frooodle/s-pdf:latest Lots of features, OP you should definitely check this out
Seems cool! Thanks for sharing. Even though it's MIT licensed it's written in Java, so unfortunately I can't borrow any code, but it's nice for inspiration.