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

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

#81

Post by nashashmi »

nirav72 wrote: post #78
nashashmi wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it is two birds with one stone? Because it is one less system to maintain? Because it is superior to a web based UI with mutliple tools under different headers? because it is simple for even the least technical? Suggestion is to use a free Pdf xchange editor by tracker software. And print the document to pdf when done.

I'm running this in a container on my nas. There isn't anything to maintain with tools like this. If setup, properly - they keep running unless stopped. They can even be auto-updated when their is a new image. I have several types of utility apps I'm self-hosting. I rarely have to do anything other than keep the OS updated.

What nas system do you use that runs containers? I tried the whole container thing and have to reboot my system every week

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

#82

Post by Jackson_Fleck »

showerst wrote: post #60

On a related note, does anyone have a good solution for highlighting arbitrary spans of text in PDFs? Trying to make viewing search results easier, but most of the solutions I've found are pretty lousy.

I think you can hack together something in pdf.js but you have to deal with the pain of digging through its code. I’m working on something of the sort in an application I’ve built but it’s v much “nice to have”.

If you’re talking about raw pdfs then you are at the whim of the encoding surely? I’ve always found Adobe etc to have utterly crap searches

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

#83

Post by perfmode »

noodlesUK wrote: post #63

One thing I think is really lacking from the PDF ecosystem is good open-source tools around signing. PDF signatures are something that is legally important in a lot of the world with regulations like eIDAS. Unfortunately it's extremely difficult to cryptographically sign PDF documents with tools other than Adobe's and some other (often more sketchy) proprietary tools. Even if you figure out how to use stuff like Libr…

does Preview in macOS not fit the bill?

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

#84

Post by TechDebtDevin »

jiriro wrote: post #68
TechDebtDevin wrote: post #9

I feel like everytime I log onto this site I encounter a finished project that's very similar to something I'm working on. I'm too slow (or project hop too much). Not that PDF related tools are uncommon but yeah I think people understand the sentiment. I'm also very surprised that for profit companies in the Document-manipulating/signing/storing still exist outside of niche industries (healthcare, govt, law) that req…

Could you please elaborate how do you sign 10k documents for $100/month?

Depends on the size of the documents but it's very straightforward. As someone mentioned it's reputation that is the expensive part.

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

#85

Post by nikisweeting »

I have some questions about the Github Star history, it's very unusual to see a ~1 year old repo with 20k+ stars.

It went from 6k to 15k+ stars in a few days around 2023 Christmas when HN/Github/Reddit traffic is usually lowest, and I didn't see a corresponding social media post or announcement around that time with that kind of traffic.

If I'm wrong and there is some big social media post / promo that I missed, I apologize, I'll eat my shorts!

https://star-history.com/#Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF&Date

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22stirling%22+%22PDF%22&sca...

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

#86

Post by atoav »

franga2000 wrote: post #30
atoav wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once tried 3 hours to get ChatGPT to write a correct cubic interpolation function. Everything it wrote was either not cubic or not an interpolation function (the resulting curve didn't pass through the input points). So yeah.

Not sure what your point is. I probably couldn't write a correct cubic interpolation function in 3 hours if you stuck me in an empty room and kept giving me the same instruction with a small change every time. But I've definitely written software as complex as this project basically from memory with only the occasional glance at some framework docs. Leetcode is a meaningless metric when evaluating application develop…

What are you talking about?

This was an example of how I gave a LLM clear instructions on a function that is known to the internet. If I told you get to use google you probably could solve this "leetcode" task in 10 minutes.

So I picked a random known algorithm and asked ChatGPT to write a function with it, just to test it.

I agree that leetcode is a useless metric, but nobody informed me that something simple like cubic interpolation belongs to this.category now. Maybe I should re-evaluate my career.

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

#88

Post by FredrikSE »

TheJoeMan wrote: post #80
noodlesUK wrote: post #63

One thing I think is really lacking from the PDF ecosystem is good open-source tools around signing. PDF signatures are something that is legally important in a lot of the world with regulations like eIDAS. Unfortunately it's extremely difficult to cryptographically sign PDF documents with tools other than Adobe's and some other (often more sketchy) proprietary tools. Even if you figure out how to use stuff like Libr…

You’re really right, I asked my IT guy who’s a windows server wizard about what it would take to implement basic PKI for internal document signing and he looked at me like I had 2 heads.

The PKI is not hard(Windows one works well), but to keep it secure and safe could be more challenging.

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

#89

Post by franga2000 »

atoav wrote: post #86
franga2000 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what your point is. I probably couldn't write a correct cubic interpolation function in 3 hours if you stuck me in an empty room and kept giving me the same instruction with a small change every time. But I've definitely written software as complex as this project basically from memory with only the occasional glance at some framework docs. Leetcode is a meaningless metric when evaluating application develop…

What are you talking about? This was an example of how I gave a LLM clear instructions on a function that is known to the internet. If I told you get to use google you probably could solve this "leetcode" task in 10 minutes. So I picked a random known algorithm and asked ChatGPT to write a function with it, just to test it. I agree that leetcode is a useless metric, but nobody informed me that something simple like c…

I'm just saying that writing a small function that has to be perfectly correct is a very different task from from writing a small web app where the space of possible solutions is incredibly large.

LLMs don't have perfect recall, so it has to reconstructtthe answer from the information it retained from training. Your example is like asking it math problems: unless it had both seen and retained the specific one you've asked it, it can't answer correctly because doesn't have the capability to reason about the problem and solve it. But something like writing a web app is closer to writing a story, where each next block it spits out doesn't have to be exactly correct, it just has to get the job done.

As for leetcode, I guess it depends on your field, but my logic is this: if I came to an interview and was told to write a microservice that receives a POSTed file, extracts some data and puts it in a DB, that's a solid work-relevant skill test. But if they asked to to write some interpolation functions, I'd consider that a leetcode interview - closer to math than programming, not a good indicator of job ability, not representative of the kind of work I'll be doing.

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