Show HN: PDF Quick – Free PDF tools with 100% client-side processing
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46094734
Show HN: A privacy-first, client-side toolbox (PDF, Imgs, Dev) no server uploads
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46018221
Show HN: FileZen – Client-side PDF and Video tools using WebAssembly
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46339833
Show HN: JW Tool Box – Free, privacy-first web tools (PDF, Image, Converters)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46065448
Show HN: PDFClear – Browser-based PDF tools with local AI (WASM+Transformers.js)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46036944
Show HN: Free PDF tools that run in the browser
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315672
Show HN: Client-side file tools – PDF, images, crypto, all in-browser
They're all wrapping PDFlib and provide the same functionality.
Optimize PDF:
#!/bin/bash
INPUT="$1"
OUTPUT="$(mktemp --suffix=.pdf)"
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \
-dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile="$OUTPUT" "$INPUT"
mv "$OUTPUT" "$INPUT"
#!/bin/sh
gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-dCompatibilityLevel=1.3 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \
-sOutputFile=merged.pdf "$@"
Moreover, I see a webapp and I immediately assume everything I do in this app is exfiltrated and abused.
I can check that the webapp advertised above is indeed local-first, but I can't be 100% sure they don't steal my data in a way I did not foresee, e.g. via websockets or cookies.
Because I learnt this the hard way by being on Instagram and Gmail.
pdftops -paper A4 -expand -level3 file.pdf # I'm from EU, so A4 is my common paper format
ps2pdf14 -dEmbedAllFonts=true \
-dUseFlateCompression=true \
-dOptimize=true \
-dProcessColorModel=/DeviceRGB \
-r72 \
-dDownsampleGrayImages=true \
-dGrayImageResolution=150 \
-dAutoFilterGrayImages=false \
-dGrayImageDownsampleType=/Bicubic \
-dDownsampleMonoImages=true \
-dMonoImageResolution=150 \
-dMonoImageDownsampleType=/Subsample \
-dDownsampleColorImages=true \
-dColorImageResolution=150 \
-dAutoFilterColorImages=false \
-dColorImageDownsampleType=/Bicubic \
-dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \
-dNOSAFER \
-dALLOWPSTRANSPARENCY \
-dShowAnnots=false \
file.ps compressed.pdfAnd for the rest, `-dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook` should already have e most of the values that you set explicitely.
Realistically, most 'normal users' have PDF needs like these links and we as tech people can safely give these sites to non-technical people and have confidence their data isn't being stolen on remote dodgy servers (think gas / electricity bills, invoices, bank statements etc which is a PII gold pot).
I have no confidence in any website, especially the one that claims to be local-only but can technically change on a whim of the developer once it starts getting enough traffic from users.
OTOH, I trust 30+ years old software sitting on on my hard drive not to phone home on every keystroke.
It's just that there's zero effort put into them so they don't really offer anything of value. If you write a todo list-tier app, it would be completely useless to most people, but it's a learning project for you. If you vibecoded a todo list-tier app, it's completely useless to most people including yourself.
All with similar design, similar implementation, similar HN post. Literally AI slop.
Also:
Show HN: BentoPDF is a privacy first PDF Toolkit
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46657892 (this one just yesterday)
Show HN: NoUploadTools – Free Tools that don't upload your files
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46516400
Show HN: TechRex – client-side PDF editor (no upload, no watermark)
I'd suggest you at least try and mitigate that by having the LLM do extensive e2e testing if you aren't interested in using your own product.
It offers Word -> PDF conversion. Just for interest I tried it and it doesn't even get the simplest page right. It puts the filename into an header. The test page had 4 images, one svg, one pdf (from svg), and another variation of the first 2. The generated PDF only contains 2 of those images with wrong sizes. The later two are missing. So it's basically completely useless.
The free of charge LibreOffice gives much better results with its own caveats.
I just don't want people to litter their heavily polished immaculately styled products that have so clearly bad user-interaction design. E2e testing and closing the loop on LLMs does seem to help here.
Though I really would prefer people click around their own product for at least 5 minutes.
Also does Adobe have some kind of patent/copyright on PDF forms? I don't think I saw any free tools that can edit fillable fields / tables in PDFs. I don't see any mention of forms in the Suite section of your app either. Is it just stupidly difficult / annoying to implement ?
Image-only PDFs (scans): These are the hardest case. If a PDF is basically high-res images (like iPhone scans), browser-based tools have limits compared to ImageMagick, which has much finer control over resampling and JPEG compression. Ghostscript-style pipelines help, but ImageMagick often wins if you’re willing to discard more detail. Improving this is on the roadmap, but it’s genuinely tough in-browser.
PDF forms: Adobe doesn’t own forms, but editable PDF forms are extremely complex and poorly standardized. Many free tools avoid true form editing because it’s easy to break files. That’s why I haven’t enabled it yet—possible, just time-consuming and error-prone.
https://repo.autonoma.ca/?action=repo&repo=notanexus.git&vie...
Basically, you drop a PDF onto your own web server. The web server serves up PDFs via PDF.js on the client. When the user highlights text to annotate it, the date, time, and text of all annotations in the document are pushed back to the server. As the author, when I reload the same PDF URL, I can add, review, modify, navigate through, or summarize the annotations just like a reader. Here's a screenshot with a funny comment one of my beta readers made:
https://i.ibb.co/5gZMJ0qc/annotations.png
Beta readers wanted, see profile for contact!
However, before the courtesy of my company giving me a macos-enabled gear - I had to cope with PDFs using multiple apps on Windows and Linux. Recently I got there again and found out that PDF support is really weak in Linux, and the formerly award winning Acrobat Reader now looks slow and poor, trying to steal my data and occupy as much space as possible. Also Acrobat Reader reference browser for linux is killed now.
Hence, the question. If everyone is using PDF, why there are no good, fast native tools? and... why are we even staying with PDF?
These online converters are immensely popular for a reason. They also used to do everything serverside and had ads all around which is obviously terrible security wise. So having WASM versions is much better.
Since these are link away they are easy to send and save. I help self-host a podcast and you need very particular settings for the export of the audio file. Instead of cooking up some automated solution, editors have bookmark of this https://ffmpeg-online.vercel.app/ with all the ffmpeg settings correctly selected and they can do the final file themselves for both their preview and production.
Compare that to having multiple people with multiple platforms having to install and learn to use some gui app.
So we built our own PDF scanner & editor — lightweight, privacy-first, and (hopefully) not annoying to use. No ads, no subscriptions. Most features are free — a couple of advanced tools require a one-time unlock. All core features run 100% offline with on-device processing.
The main features are built for everyday workflows:
Scan documents — auto edge detect, live corner adjust, batch multi-page Fill and sign forms — reusable signatures, flatten for secure sharing OCR text recognition — preserves layout, searchable PDFs or clean text export (supports 18 languages, e.g., English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, etc.) Edit OCR-detected text — adjust or fix recognised text Page tools — reorder, rotate, duplicate, delete, extract pages Annotations and highlights — comments, text notes, custom watermarks Folder organization — custom folders, drag-and-drop move/rename Everything runs locally — no accounts, no tracking, no upload processing. You can download an AI model to your device (one-time download — it stays cached), and then:
- ask questions about a document - summarise sections or chapters - extract key points or data - turn long documents into quick notes - After the model is installed, all Chat PDF processing happens fully offline on your device.
The app is free to download, and most features are free (scanning, OCR, signatures, annotations, editing, etc).
We wanted to keep the essential tools free, and only charge once for a few advanced features.
We also put together a YouTube playlist with short feature walkthroughs.
You can find the app here: https://apps.apple.com/ro/app/pdf-master-scan-edit-sign/id67...
We’d really appreciate feedback — especially on the Chat PDF feature (usefulness, speed, UX, edge cases, things it should do better). If you try it and have suggestions, we’re actively improving the app based on user feedback.
Buy-me-coffee / you can donate / payments in bitcoins accepted / pay as you use / etc.
But I am curious what could work so people wouldn’t be discouraged immediately?
Subscription (monthly/quarterly/annual) is annoying as well…
Adobe has started this wave, I remember it vividly.
Very very small note - many clickable things on your site (the "explore" and "new task" buttons, the directory and blog links at the top, etc.) don't change the cursor to the css "cursor:pointer" (ie the clicky hand)
You might want to add `cursor-pointer` to your tailwind <button> elements
How? Who?
Most of them are freemium, so they're balancing resources funded by subscriptions against the majority free user usage.
And is this local first (as it says on the website) or local only?
Built a client only webapp myself and offline usage is the main thing users ask about.
also not just PDF the image processing also WIP will be done by next week
* it doesn't seem to select/edit existing components
* Delete button doesn't work on a drawing
* Insert text button doesn't work
On Google Chrome. Am I the only one who tried this out?
anyway, if you save the page in Chrome and serve it on a local server, it works even with internet disabled, so there's that.
There are already free PDF editors that can be downloaded and installed once forever. What I used most is Libreoffice Draw: it imports a PDF, edit it as if it were a file in its own format, export as PDF again. It's not the only choice. Firefox has had a vanilla PDF editor since last year: download a PDF or drag one inside the browser window, edit it, save it. It's enough to add a PNG of my signature and fill out forms.
Local-only web apps are great one-off projects, but extensions and native apps require much more maintenance.
Running an executable is a risk by default and the way it interacts with my network is way less transparent. I honestly prefer this in the browser.
even if it might not stand before court it is enough for a lawyer to write you a letter that is not 100% baseless.
Now, privacy, I love it! That "normal people" just store stuff in the cloud "it's on my phone", yeah ok, is one thing. It's another topic…
But since Gmail came out and was all the rage in nerd circles, I am wondering why the people who understand the tech the most, are so eager to hand over their data to Big Tech and some other very questionable entities.
Here's the thing in terms of money.
If your app does put my data into the cloud, I am not going to use it. At all. Ever.
If your app blesses me with a beautifully designed native GUI (or UI), instead of presenting itself in Electron slop to me, then I am already almost sold. Literally. I start to consider forking over some cash to you, dear developer of that beautifully designed, privacy respecting app.
I do use my browser to browse the web. I am not interested in a "secondary OS architecture" where I have to play sys admin for a range of "apps" aka plugins. Neither Chrome plugins (I don't use Chromium based stuff.) nor Wordpress plugins, nor Emacs "modes" are going to replace well done native programs.
You don't care enough about your project to provide a native program? Tells me, I shouldn't care either. Good buy.
For a high school student who survives on an allowance, paying $39 for an app may be a bit much, but not for an adult with an income.
Curation. A good maintained app store does all the "sys admin" stuff for me. No viruses, no weird installation procedures and so on.
This is why that works. Hassle-free. Locally-run, native app, means beauty and privacy.
I would pay for that. Happily. In fact, I have done so many times. The success of a plethora of developers with paid-for apps in the stores proves I am not the only one.
And, btw, this is the distribution/commerce model that RMS always favoured. I quote RMS:
> Since “free” refers to freedom, not to price, there is no contradiction between selling copies and free software. In fact, the freedom to sell copies is crucial: collections of free software sold on CD-ROMs are important for the community, and selling them is an important way to raise funds for free software development. Therefore, a program that people are not free to include on these collections is not free software.
This is basically the app-store model.
And I would pay, for the above stated reasons and I would be inclined to gulp an even higher price if the package has the "OSS inside" sticker on it. For personal reasons, right?
Then there is one last thing. I don't want to have to create an account somewhere just to test-drive your app. Or to use it fully, later on.
Privacy means, I don't have to be online in order to use the software. The end.
Can we add workflows to this?
First merge all files then depending on output size compress to fit the size and other requirements?
Or take out page 35, then compress rest
Or extract page 2,5 and merge them and give me output withoit compress
