Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stirling PDF: Self-hosted, web-based PDF manipulation tool

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 107 posts

Re: Stirling PDF: Self-hosted, web-based PDF manipulation tool

#41

Post by smartmic »

maweki wrote: post #24

I host this at home. I don't use it myself, I can use the linux CLI tools that its based on. But I prefer my wife to use this to convert/split/etc. her pdf files this way instead of using some random website or app (that uses the same cli tool anyway). She doesn't mind either way. Seems to work well enough for her use cases.

> … use the Linux CLI tools it is based on

I am interested in this part. Here is what I found: https://pdfbox.apache.org/2.0/commandline.html

Since PDFBox is a Java application, it should work cross-platform, not just Linux. Please correct me if you mean something else.

Re: Stirling PDF: Self-hosted, web-based PDF manipulation tool

#42

Post by Odenwaelder »

petepete wrote: post #23

I'd love it if this could be integrated into Paperless. Every now and then one of my scanned documents goes in upside down and I need to rescan. Clicking rotate, maybe reordering and letting it be rescanned would be great.

The latest version of paperless-ngx can rotate documents. Check it out!

Re: Stirling PDF: Self-hosted, web-based PDF manipulation tool

#43

Post by neitsab »

frooodle wrote: post #35
anotherhue wrote: post #2

> Originally developed entirely by ChatGPT, this locally hosted web application has evolved to encompass a comprehensive set of features, addressing all your PDF requirements. Well that's that then.

Creator here, I think there is some confusion in my doc. It's not made with fully with chatgpt It was initially created as a 24 hour challenge to make a full app with chatgpt 3.0 in a set time limit to test what chatgpt was like last year. I posted on Reddit it got lots of demand and I turned it into a full app,the only full chatgpt was the first 24 hours, it's over a year later now

Yes, it would be a great idea to update the wording as there is no way to derive that from the current one.

Even being sympathetic, my thought reading this was "probably bad code quality/rotten core despite the great feature set".

You can have a "History/Background/Origin" section where you put exactly what you wrote in your comment and it will be fine.

This notwithstanding, thank you very much for developing this app! I will look into deploying it on my server, it will be of great help to people around me who often need manipulating PDFs but are not super technical!

Re: Stirling PDF: Self-hosted, web-based PDF manipulation tool

#46

Post by emarsden »

apexalpha wrote: post #32
emarsden wrote: post #11

From the README: “Stirling PDF does not initiate any outbound calls for record-keeping or tracking purposes”. Beyond auditing the code, how could a potential user verify this claim in advance, and how can a web-based app help support such a claim (in particular when the app does need to make some web requests to operate, but only to a restricted list of URLs that might be listed in a manifest along the lines of a Con…

Just put a sniffer or network capture tool like Wireshark in between. Additionally you could restrict the apps network access entirely to just your local home network.

It seems that there is some missing tooling to make this convenient.

You can run a local bundle of HTML/JS/WASM in a web browser instance that you isolate (for example with firejail) to prevent network access. You distribute as a zip/tgz, but it's not obvious how to handle updates without a full redownload. Distributing with a full Electron-like interface is obviously overkill.

If you're running a web app that's hosted elsewhere (which will be much more convenient for most people), your web browser or the software isolation functionality (or firewall/proxy) needs to distinguish between the initial resource loads (approve) and later sneaky logging requests (ban).

There are Android applications such as TrackerControl that have related functionality (operates as a local VPN to filter all network requests and block tracking) but I don't know of convenient tools for the desktop (Linux, in particular).

Re: Stirling PDF: Self-hosted, web-based PDF manipulation tool

#47

Post by cjblomqvist »

GlacierFox wrote: post #33

Anyone got an alternative that wasn't developed entirely in ChatGPT?

Anecdotally from previous HN discussions, I believe a lot of the code is now not developed by ChatGPT anymore.

Update: As evident by the author's comment below, it's definitely not made by ChatGPT anymore (in any major way)

Re: Stirling PDF: Self-hosted, web-based PDF manipulation tool

#48

Post by maweki »

smartmic wrote: post #41
maweki wrote: post #24

I host this at home. I don't use it myself, I can use the linux CLI tools that its based on. But I prefer my wife to use this to convert/split/etc. her pdf files this way instead of using some random website or app (that uses the same cli tool anyway). She doesn't mind either way. Seems to work well enough for her use cases.

> … use the Linux CLI tools it is based on I am interested in this part. Here is what I found: https://pdfbox.apache.org/2.0/commandline.html Since PDFBox is a Java application, it should work cross-platform, not just Linux. Please correct me if you mean something else.

I am sorry. I was under the impression that, at least for some features, Stirling PDF also uses pdfjam or similar, instead of wholly delegating to PDFBox. I think the point still stands, that there are powerful cli tools and I wouldn't consider running this container just for myself.

Probably anybody who can get this docker container running, can use appropiate open source cli tools. So one would wonder about the target audience. I don't. ;)

But I do indeed LibreOffice's command line conversion features.

Re: Stirling PDF: Self-hosted, web-based PDF manipulation tool

#49

Post by figmert »

frooodle wrote: post #34
haidev wrote: post #8

How is this entirely developed by ChatGPT? Does the author claim that all the code in there was generated by ChatGPT?

Creator here, I think there is some confusion in my doc. It's not made with fully with chatgpt It was initially created as a 24 hour challenge to make a full app with chatgpt 3.0 in a set time limit to test what chatgpt was like last year. I posted on Reddit it got lots of demand and I turned it into a full app,the only full chatgpt was the first 24 hours, it's over a year later now

I'd love to know how you did that initial 24 hour challenge. Maybe a blog post or something? If I were to go about creating a start to an application using ChatGPT, how would I go about it?

Re: Stirling PDF: Self-hosted, web-based PDF manipulation tool

#50

Post by petepete »

moritzruth wrote: post #40
petepete wrote: post #23

I'd love it if this could be integrated into Paperless. Every now and then one of my scanned documents goes in upside down and I need to rescan. Clicking rotate, maybe reordering and letting it be rescanned would be great.

The last minor release of paperless-ngx added merging, splitting and rotating. Source: https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/changelog/#paperless-ngx-270

Ah thanks. I'd actually updated but didn't read the changelog and hadn't noticed the new functionality!
Post reply on HN