[HN Gopher] Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform vario...
___________________________________________________________________
Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations
on PDFs
Author : alexzeitler
Score : 470 points
Date : 2023-12-25 20:02 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| rodlette wrote:
| Nice. I've been looking for something like this to self-host, to
| avoid my partner uploading sensitive documents to random PDF
| manipulation websites.
|
| Any better alternatives I should be considering?
| thephotonsphere wrote:
| You can simply use poppler-utils on your on computer? It's a
| collection of commandline tools for PDF-manipulation. More
| information can be found here:
| https://pypi.org/project/poppler-utils/
| Etheryte wrote:
| If you happen to be on macOS, the Preview app does an absurd
| number of things to PDFs, and it does it well. To be honest I'm
| always surprised it isn't highlighted more by Apple, it's a
| great tool that pretty much always just works. You can split
| files, join them, rotate, add signatures, drawings,
| annotations, redact sections, etc. The feature list is long,
| especially considering that by the name of the application
| you'd think it could just preview files, not edit them.
| sumedh wrote:
| > to be honest I'm always surprised it isn't highlighted more
| by Apple
|
| Probably because its not so intuitive, I have to google how
| to use some of the advanced features of Preview.
| cde-v wrote:
| Edge is surprising decent for marking up PDFs.
| somethingsome wrote:
| I often use PDF Sam (basic) and usually it works quite well and
| is offline.
|
| https://pdfsam.org/
| jftuga wrote:
| A really nice, stand-alone command line tool is pdfcpu.
|
| https://github.com/pdfcpu/pdfcpu
| rodlette wrote:
| Looks great, but my partner needs something more convenient.
|
| It needs to be web based and work on desktop/mobile.
| bayindirh wrote:
| KDE's Okular. Works on Linux, Windows and macOS.
|
| If you're on already macOS, Preview already has you covered.
| jbc1 wrote:
| Does it need to be a self hosted web based tool or do you just
| need PDF software? If the latter I find PDF Expert to be
| powerful and nice to use.
| tony69 wrote:
| I use pdftool.org which I saw on HN a while back
| christkv wrote:
| Can it add attachments to pdf files?. Until this year I did not
| even know that this was possible but a government agency asked me
| to add files as attachments to a pdf as their website only
| allowed uploading valid pdf files.
| alexzeitler wrote:
| Have learned about it this year as well
| layer8 wrote:
| You can use Acrobat Reader for that.
| rozman50 wrote:
| https://tools.pdf24.org/en/creator
|
| This tools is not open source, but it's free. Files should remain
| on local pc. Developers claim that they make money only by
| advertisement on their website.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| Wow, it covers almost anything, including redacting text.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Great tool. The stirling looked exactly the same, except on a
| server.
|
| I wonder why it's not open source by now.
| toasted-subs wrote:
| Self hosted sites are pretty awesome. Love seeing these here.
| zikohh wrote:
| I like using https://www.pdftool.org/en
| kleiba wrote:
| What about pdftk?
| eyegor wrote:
| pdftk has an issue where it corrupts pdfs occasionally in
| modern windows server versions. Had a weird bug in a random
| helper service at work that we narrowed down to pdftk
| mangling documents sometimes. Never looked much into it since
| it was only a couple of hours to replace it with another
| tool, and haven't had issues since. I think all we used it
| for was merging and adding watermark text.
| anjanb wrote:
| "replace it with another tool" which tool was that ?
| laurensr wrote:
| What seems to be missing is an OSS tool to add/remove form fields
| adamnemecek wrote:
| I have not looked into this yet but can someone recommend an
| application for repairing pdfs? For example, I have PDFs where
| selecting text highlights a line above or below.
| me_jumper wrote:
| Try converting it to PDF/A
| adamnemecek wrote:
| That's not it.
| layer8 wrote:
| That doesn't sound like the PDF is broken, just that it uses
| unusual font metrics or line displacements. Tools that could
| amend this are unlikely to exist.
|
| More generally, the PDF format is too flexible to decide what
| is "broken" or really is as intended, in many cases. It's l a
| bit like asking for a tool that repairs "broken" source code
| where it's really just the business logic that is broken.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Some ocr no?
| RyanShook wrote:
| I have a PDF problem that I thought was simple but has proven
| difficult to solve and there is no paid solution I've found...
|
| I want to forward an email to an inbox, have the email body
| converted into a PDF, and then email that attachment to someone
| all automatically. I've tried Make, Zapier, pdf.co, pdftool, and
| a few other tools but have had no success. Has anyone solved this
| problem reliably?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38545255
|
| https://www.tapdone.com/
|
| perhaps? Or something similar?
| RyanShook wrote:
| Thanks for sharing!
| victorbojica wrote:
| If you are able to code or can ask someone, then you should be
| able to do it with some email api service (Nylas, AWS SES, etc)
| or headless client that gets the body of the email and convert
| it to pdf using wkhtmltopdf and then send it as attachment
| using the same service as before.
|
| Using low/no code tools might be very hard/unlikely
| RyanShook wrote:
| Thanks, yes I think this is the right direction. Surprised it
| doesn't exist as SAAS, I guess demand isn't there.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| If you want the pdf to look anything like the email, you
| will need to render it in a browser and capture a pdf. It's
| not particularly hard if you know what you're doing.
| vinibrito wrote:
| Any libs to help with that? Thanks.
| la_fayette wrote:
| A headlees browser like e.g. puppeteer would do the job.
| I use it a lot for exatly that purpous...
| cyanydeez wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you can do this with a Office365 & their
| automation stack Power Automate.
|
| Obviously it's only an option if your org has already sunk
| deep into Microsoft-of-things (MoT) universe.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I did something like this 10 years ago as an internal tool for
| a company. BAck then I did it with Outlook VBA.
| karl_gluck wrote:
| Google Apps Script can do all of this. Take the email body and
| put it into a Google doc, then export the doc as a pdf to drive
| and attach it from there to send.
| fgonzag wrote:
| It seems quite doable but you'd need scripting skills to set it
| all up. Read the incoming queue, pass it to wkhtmltopdf then
| pipe the result to the mail command. For windows I believe I
| once used a java smtp server (apache james) that allowed you to
| set custom code as an incoming email handler. After that the
| conversion and email sending is trivial.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Probably depends on the purpose of the pdf and why it needs to
| be an attachment, but I'd just skip all the steps and print the
| email since that's more or less what pdf is for. Print it and
| re-attach or just print at the destination.
| RyanShook wrote:
| This is what I currently do. I was just hoping to automate
| the process.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| If you have access to O365 (or whatever it is called this week)
| this would be easy to do using powerautomate
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| I think Mail.app in macOS can do that with Automator. At the
| very least, the PDF emails coming from an email address and
| forward as attachment bits.
| mlfreeman wrote:
| Anecdotal bug warning:
|
| Mail.app _can_ "Export as PDF" from the File menu, but I
| noticed on 13.6 that it exports blank pages if the email is
| plain text only.
|
| I had to choose to print the emails and then save as PDF from
| the print dialog.
| hkhanna wrote:
| I needed this for expensing receipts that come via email. I
| created an API for it where you POST the email to an endpoint
| and get back a PDF.
|
| Email me and I'll give you access for free.
| reachableceo wrote:
| If you need to send an email anyway , why not print to pdf and
| email the pdf?
| davchana wrote:
| I use Google apps script for it.
|
| A filter labels a specific email.
|
| A timed trigger runs a script.
|
| Script fetches all emails with that filter.
|
| Script runs in loop. Convers each message into a blob, blob
| gets converted to pdf. Pdf gets saved in google drive. Email
| gets label removed.
|
| My code was based on this
| https://www.labnol.org/code/19117-save-gmail-as-pdf
| karol wrote:
| Why can't this be an electron app?
| Froodle wrote:
| Dev here, totally could, we dismissed it at first as electron
| is quite bulky containing a whole chromium instance inside the
| exe. instead we kept it small as possible for the exe version
| We have plans for a full UI version in V2. We are releasing V1
| (SPDF is currently in beta) sometime this month. But have begun
| work on a V2 port to different language and framework.
| eyegor wrote:
| As an alternative you could write some automation scripts to
| handle all the requirements for self hosted install. If you
| look at oogaboogas text-generation-webui [0] you can see what
| I mean. Although ease of install also leads to a larger user
| base, which can be a double edged sword for something as
| ubiquitous as a pdf app. It's much easier to get people to
| submit issues than to help solve them.
|
| [0] eg, windows install script
| https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-
| webui/blob/main...
| 101008 wrote:
| I still couldn't find a tool for a difficult problem to solve. I
| have some magazines in PDF, with layouts in two columns, etc. I
| want them to be transformed into Markdown. I know, it should
| identify automatically the two columns, different layouts, etc.
|
| I am not desiring something perfect - I can fix if ther are some
| errors, but so far nothing has come with a good result.
| layer8 wrote:
| This can be arbitrarily difficult to do, depending on the PDF.
| This is generally called PDF _reflowing_. Another approach is
| to use column-aware OCR software.
| qingcharles wrote:
| This is a hard problem. Cut the PDF down so it's only the pages
| of the article you want and then try feeding it through GPT Pro
| or Claude?
| jftuga wrote:
| Have you tried this (for at least solving part of the problem)?
|
| https://github.com/pdfcpu/pdfcpu
| stavros wrote:
| Depending on how much you're willing to pay, the OpenAI GPT-
| Vision API can definitely do this extremely well.
| 101008 wrote:
| I am willing to pay for this, I only have around ~80 files,
| with 30 pages each (average). Is there a quick way to test
| this without wasting too much on the code part?
| stavros wrote:
| Yes, ChatGPT will do it if you upload photos of the page.
| 101008 wrote:
| I just tried it with the API and it worked better than
| expected. Now I need to find to convert PDF to JPG with
| an API, and find the best prompt to ask GPT to only
| convert to markdown articles and not pages with columns,
| ads, etc. Thanks!
| stavros wrote:
| No problem! There are many Linux programs (some in this
| thread) to convert a pdf to images, and the prompt will
| hopefully not be too hard.
|
| I started making app to read our board game cards out
| loud (with voice) for our horror board game nights
| (https://boardguru.net) and GPT-4 could read cards that I
| couldn't make out!
| slig wrote:
| >Now I need to find to convert PDF to JPG with an API
|
| You can do that very easily with a locally installed
| ImageMagick. ChatGPT can help with the commands needed,
| but should be just one to convert a PDF to a number of
| JPGs and a small shell script to run on all your files.
| solardev wrote:
| I use Briss for this: https://github.com/mbaeuerle/Briss-2.0
|
| It overlays all the pages on top of each other, you the human
| draws rectangles around the stacked columns in the easy GUI,
| and then it processes them into pages.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| The built-in apple preview application does exactly what you
| want..
|
| It just looses bold etc.
| pklee wrote:
| Have you considered marker. Does a very good job of turning PDF
| into markdown. - https://github.com/VikParuchuri/marker
| rmbyrro wrote:
| I bet GPT vision will do that like cutting a piece of cake.
| It'll even do the OCR for you and organize the text nicely.
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| How easy or difficult would it be to turn this into an electron
| app so that non-technical users can use it easily too?
| layer8 wrote:
| Better use existing applications like PDFsam [0] or PDF-XChange
| [1].
|
| [0] https://pdfsam.org/pdfsam-basic/
|
| [1] https://pdf-xchange.eu/pdf-xchange-editor/
| ornornor wrote:
| Why "better use some to big else"?
| Froodle wrote:
| Dev here, totally could, we dismissed it at first as electron
| is quite bulky containing a whole chromium instance inside the
| exe. instead we kept it small as possible for the exe version
| Truth is its not to hard to port to electron We have plans for
| a full UI version in V2. We are releasing V1 (SPDF is currently
| in beta) sometime this month. But have begun work on a V2 port
| to different language and framework.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Quasar.dev provides a full "interoperable" solution to get to
| electron and others. All the code can be written as regular
| Vue3, then built for:
|
| - SPAs (Single Page App)
|
| - SSR (Server-side Rendered App) (+ optional PWA client
| takeover)
|
| - PWAs (Progressive Web App)
|
| - BEX (Browser Extension)
|
| - Mobile Apps (Android, iOS, ...) through Cordova or
| Capacitor Multi-platform Desktop Apps (using Electron)
|
| Might be worth considering if you're going full client.
| judge2020 wrote:
| It would be nice if it were WASM-based. Then someone could host
| that version of the app and it'd still be local processing.
| ziofill wrote:
| it says this started as a 100% chatGPT project!
| jwilk wrote:
| What does it mean?
| monospaced wrote:
| From my understanding they mean the code was generated by
| instructing OpenAI's ChatGPT (contrary to writing the code
| themselves).
| d4rkp4ttern wrote:
| I'll join some other commenters, to add my favorite difficult pdf
| problem that I haven't found a ready to use (even paid) solution
| for: extract key value pairs from a filled form such as this
| medical claims form:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/EJDi7L7
|
| There are two levels of difficulty: the starting file could be an
| image (pdf or png or jpg), which is the most difficult scenario.
| The slightly easier one is where it's a text-based pdf so no OCR
| is needed.
|
| I threw this as an image file at google form parser but it did
| poorly, I.e missed quite a few fields.
| Froodle wrote:
| Dev here for the above stirling pdf app, Please raise features
| like this as a feature request github issue ticket and we can
| try address it in future!
| kpandit wrote:
| I would do exactly what you have done here if I were the dev
| of the said app. But with the luxury of being an outsider, a
| user has expressed an inconvenience and it seems to make
| sense, then if I were to be the dev of the app here, wouldn't
| I go and create the ticket in whatever system with a link to
| this post instead of asking the user of the app to follow the
| red tape? I know there are places where this is not
| incentivised so this is a question for your org and not for
| you.
| d4rkp4ttern wrote:
| I tend to agree. As an open source dev myself, I avoid
| asking folks to create issues, as it puts a burden on the
| user. I've see some highly respected open source leads so
| this, and I'm not faulting them, as I think they're coming
| from a good place; it may be a difference of opinion on
| what's best practice.
| Froodle wrote:
| I see what you're saying and for simple features I agree
| However Without the OP creating the ticket there can be no
| feedback look on the feature. If i wanted it tested for
| their usecase, there input and confirmation on if its what
| they wanted and improvements for the workflow etc.. If I
| base the whole feature on this comment it could end up only
| doing half a job. Id rather have that communication loop
| open!
| Sai_ wrote:
| Not OP. My take is that if the requester can't be bothered
| to create a GH issue, it's likely that this isn't really a
| problem for them. An annoyance possibly but has not risen
| to "pain" levels.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| This is open source software sir, it needs multiple steps
| to ensure users actually need these features and are
| willing to use them.
| Closi wrote:
| Have you tried Azure AI Document Intelligence?
|
| In theory it's exactly this...
| brianjking wrote:
| I second this, that or have you tried GPT-4 Vision or Donut?
| qingcharles wrote:
| I second trying GPT-4 Vision, though they have dumbed it
| down a bit since launch.
| d4rkp4ttern wrote:
| Still waiting for GPT4V but doubt it will do this. Yes I've
| tried Donut and other options but this is a very gnarly
| problem.
|
| One option is to extract text blocks along with their
| coordinates (unstructured.io gives this, probably based on
| another pkg because it's basically a container for many
| pigs). Then do the same with a blank template, and you then
| have an algorithmic problem of matching the filled values
| spatially with the key locations from the template.
| brianjking wrote:
| I'm fairly confident GPT-4V will do this just fine, tbh.
|
| You just need to extract each of the elements into a
| structured JSON or something, right?
|
| I'll try with your example later today.
| d4rkp4ttern wrote:
| Exactly, the form has filled values in named cells, so we
| need a JSON of cellName -> filledValue mappings.
|
| Let me know how GPT-4V does!
| ylk wrote:
| This could be a paid option for parsing forms (not sure about
| ocr):
| https://demos.textcontrol.com/chapter/topic/PDF/PDFFormData
| https://www.textcontrol.com/technologies/pdf/
| dave8088 wrote:
| Their scummy website doesn't list their prices in any way I
| can see. Hard pass.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| Does it support adding / managing named form fields?
| Froodle wrote:
| dev here, Not currently but its a planned feature
| tobinfricke wrote:
| Probability density functions, presumably. Oh, partial
| differential equations?
|
| For the document files, I love PDF Studio:
| https://www.qoppa.com/pdfstudio/
| ObscureScience wrote:
| What I have mainly have been looking for in the free software
| ecosystem is a good tool to work with PDF
| tagging/structure/element attributes.
|
| At work I really have only been able to do the work I need on
| random PDFs with Adobe Acrobat. It seems strange that this is the
| case as PDF is now an open standard.
| Ldorigo wrote:
| LibreOffice Draw can do that (not sure about tagging).
| Alifatisk wrote:
| It's scary how such a widely used format (PDF) is almost in full
| control by Adobe. I have yet to see a true competitor to Adobe
| Acrobat. The only one that has come really close is the one that
| comes built-in for macOS. It's a hidden gem.
| philsnow wrote:
| Does that one have a name? I'm a MacOS transplant and have
| never gotten terribly familiar with the territory. Thanks!
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Preview is the app on macOS that lets you view and even edit
| PDF files.
| jwong_ wrote:
| preview.app
| cmdrriker wrote:
| Preview.app which owes its heritage to NextStep.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preview
| philsnow wrote:
| ... ah, thanks, I misread. I thought GP was talking about a
| document format in the same space as PDF that was native to
| MacOS.
| bla3 wrote:
| PDF had an open spec and oodles of programs supporting it. I
| don't understand where this comment is coming from.
| webel0 wrote:
| Adobe acrobat (and maybe reader) is really the only app that
| fully supports the full PDF spec as understood by the authors
| of the spec. There are ridiculous parts of the spec that
| allow support for things like JS, etc.
| cmrx64 wrote:
| I don't think it's ridiculous to want a scriptable
| document, especially for complicated forms. Likewise for
| the other much-dragged features for 3d scenes.
|
| https://pdfa.org/resource/pdf-in-manufacturing/ is a great
| usecase.
| fuzztester wrote:
| The PDF spec even supports attachments in PDF files.
| rudasn wrote:
| How does that work exactly? Is it widely supported?
|
| I recently had to add an embed feature to our pdf
| rendering, to allow users to embed other pdfs inside the
| one we generate for them. Since we use headless Chrome, I
| used pdfjs from mozilla to render the embedded pdf on
| screen before generating the pdf, so you can actually see
| and read the embedded pdf.
|
| Works pretty well, but was wondering about this
| attachment feature of pdfs.
| cmrx64 wrote:
| PDF is a container format and yoy can just shove files in
| there. pdftk supports this with attach_files, and at the
| very least the linux pdf readers I've used know how to
| deal with them.
| rudasn wrote:
| TIL!
|
| Since these pdfs end up in whatever and how old devices,
| I'd rather not risk it though.
| fuzztester wrote:
| good question. how it works is an implementation
| question. read the PDF spec (big, and somewhat hard to
| grok in parts) or Google about it. I don't know. I just
| knew about the fact, because I have done some work with
| PDF. also don't know if it is widely supported, sorry.
| fuzztester wrote:
| nice idea there.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| What's wrong with using a sane subset of the spec aka
| PDF/A?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I've seen many third party PDF viewers; I think all
| supported JavaScript. It's commonplace, not 'ridiculous' at
| all.
|
| > Adobe acrobat (and maybe reader) is really the only app
| that fully supports the full PDF spec
|
| The full spec is large and afaik has many obscure pieces,
| including 3-D, etc. Like many specs, they don't match
| reality and nobody takes completeness too seriously. For
| almost all users, supporting the entire PDF spec doesn't
| matter (does it matter for any user - does any person or
| organization use the entire spec over their lifetimes?).
|
| Also, do we know that Adobe supports the entire spec?
| mpweiher wrote:
| Yeah, even Adobe doesn't really use the full spec. Or at
| least didn't.
|
| There's a fairly big chunk in the spec of special
| presentation attributes for slideshows. When I
| implemented them I was surprised that slide shows
| produced by Acrobat didn't work. Well, obviously my
| implementation was buggy.
|
| Er, no, Adobe didn't use their own slide show attributes
| for the slide shows produced by Acrobat. They used
| JavaScript instead.
|
| Oh well. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| bdd8f1df777b wrote:
| That is true, but I have never encountered a PDF that is
| not produced by me and cannot be faithfully represented in
| third party PDF readers. And I give up the idea of
| producing those kinds of PDFs because I know the people I
| send to will complain about me rather than their PDF
| readers. So, Adobe Acrobat doesn't have any monopoly power
| here, since almost no one cares about those things only
| they can do.
| Moru wrote:
| We often get PDF's that does not work in our pipeline and
| it's always blamed on the pipeline, not on the creating
| software. The user usually converts the PDF to an image
| with adobe reader and screenshot, load up Libreoffice,
| paste and export it as PDF archive.
| bdd8f1df777b wrote:
| So the PDF that does not work in your pipeline is created
| by LibreOffice rather than Adobe Acrobat? That doesn't
| seem to add any strength to the argument that "Adobe
| Acrobat has unusual powers because only it can handle the
| full spec of PDF".
| Moru wrote:
| No, you missread. The PDF that works is created by
| anything that does not use the full spec of new PDF
| versions. We have chosen Libreoffice because we already
| use it for other things. If we recreate the PDF in
| Libreoffice as PDF archive version it works just fine.
| The problem is usually a pamphlet created by some ad
| agency using the absolutely latest version of some layout
| program, neither adobe nor libreoffice. The PDF usually
| works just fine in Adobe but not in our pipeline that
| uses all sorts of linux programs to process into a JPG in
| the format and orientation our system needs. Noone has
| had the time or energy to fix it since most stuff works
| so for now it will be downsampled by a screenshot and
| just showed into the system. The added benefit is the PDF
| shrinks from 150 MB to 300 kB in the process.
|
| Adobe Acrobat is the only thing that can handle all cases
| yes. All other programs uses (different) special cases
| each and most of them fail in some edge cases. It can be
| funny letters showing up because of fonts not working
| properly or images disapearing or all sorts of things. I
| have given up to fix them all. I still have a library of
| PDF's that we used to run through to try to get as many
| as possible to work.
| izacus wrote:
| > That is true, but I have never encountered a PDF that
| is not produced by me and cannot be faithfully
| represented in third party PDF readers.
|
| That's because PDF is well designed and has a fallback
| for advanced page elements so more primitive readers can
| still render them.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Agreed. Also, possibly the most commonly used reader is
| pdf.js, the FOSS component used by at least some major web
| browsers.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| I'd guess it's the fact that nothing supports editing PDFs
| except Adobe Acrobat. Not to any sufficient extent.
| LibreOffice Draw kinda try to do it but also corrupts the
| file IME.
|
| Edit: Apparently some people can edit PDFs reliably with
| MacOS Preview.app, LibreOffice Draw or pdftk.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Where are people getting this information? There are many
| applications that support edting PDFs, more than I can
| remember.
| asdfologist wrote:
| I find Chrome's built-in PDF viewer much snappier than Adobe
| Acrobat.
| noAnswer wrote:
| Sadly I had to install Adobe Reader on my father PC again
| after he had documents* with formulas. Chrome would calculate
| the numbers wrong. Everything was off by 10.
|
| *To get reimburses from a union or something.
| asdfologist wrote:
| Whoa, I had no idea PDFs can have formulas.
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| You can embed Javascript in PDFs
| fuzztester wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38768892
| aragonite wrote:
| If you occasionally need Adobe Reader/Acrobat exclusive
| features but don't want to install, you can use the free
| online version of Acrobat. It's pretty decent though it
| doesn't have all the features:
|
| https://acrobat.adobe.com/us/en/
| manmal wrote:
| I recently had issues with macOS' Preview.app and formulas.
| It's a nice feature, but probably not widely supported.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Foxit Phantom is pretty good
| Alifatisk wrote:
| It costs, I might aswell pay for Acrobat.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| What if Foxit works better and costs less?
| pmarreck wrote:
| It's incredible to me that not only has Preview.app been the
| best non-Adobe way to use PDF's for _decades_ now and only on
| macOS (perhaps because NextStep, its roots, used PostScript
| natively?) but that Linux actually also seems to have better
| tooling in this space than Windows (where you're pretty much
| stuck with Adobe Reader if you want a free solution)
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Preview.app been the best non-Adobe way to use PDF's for
| decades now
|
| Where is all this stuff coming from? Why would you say
| Preview is the best? Foxit? Nitro? Their are endless PDF
| applications much more powerful and capable, some designed
| for professionals.
| ornornor wrote:
| For annotating and adding a hand drawn signature to PDFs,
| preview really is the best: lightweight, straightforward,
| free, comes with the OS. I don't know any comparable app
| for Linux (or windows although I rarely use it)
| nip wrote:
| https://simplePDF.eu will be the closest << Preview-like
| >> experience on Linux (and any OS really).
|
| It's local only (the document you load and data you fill
| in never leave the browser) and free
|
| Disclosure: I'm the developer behind it
| Alifatisk wrote:
| Any plans on implementing redaction?
| nip wrote:
| If the background is white, it's already possible:
| https://simplepdf.eu/help/faq/how-to-add-background
|
| For other colors, it's in the backlog!
|
| (I'd aiming to automatically provide the correct color by
| inspecting pixels within the area to redact, to make it
| as simple as possible)
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| "Best" isn't necessarily the same as "has the most
| features".
|
| I think many people find that Preview.app does everything
| they ever wanted to do with PDFs. It really is surprisingly
| capable. It's also fast and far less convoluted than most
| PDF tools I have seen.
|
| And of course it comes free with every Mac, which often
| makes it "best" in terms of value for money.
|
| It doesn't help that many PDF editors (including the two
| you mentioned) are full of the most ridiculous pricing
| shenanigans.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > many PDF editors (including the two you mentioned) are
| full of the most ridiculous pricing shenanigans.
|
| What shenanigans? On one computer, we have a 15 year old
| version of Foxit running as good as new, no further
| licensing needed.
| wpm wrote:
| Isn't SumatraPDF a decent program for Windows?
|
| In regards to Preview, I still find it insane that it doesn't
| have an iOS/iPadOS equivalent. Bits of the functionality are
| scattered all over the place, usually in ways that don't feel
| as good as they do on the Mac. Sometimes I just want to open
| a PDF and leave it open, and not have to do it from Files
| which assumes I want to do _something_ else with it than just
| looking.
| sphars wrote:
| I personally use SumatraPDF on Windows, but it's basically
| just a fantastic PDF viewer. It does little else in regards
| to editing/modifying PDFs. Even the PDF viewer in Edge does
| more.
|
| But for a lightweight, bloat-free experience, SumatraPDF is
| the way to go.
| kergonath wrote:
| > perhaps because NextStep, its roots, used PostScript
| natively?
|
| And OS X and its successors use Display PDF natively, which
| is why it is trivial to save almost anything that can be
| displayed into a PDF file. The PDF stack that Preview.app
| leverages is a foundation of the OS itself.
| izacus wrote:
| What a bizarre comment - Preview.app isn't even the best PDF
| software on Apple platforms (it's more likely something like
| Readdle's PDF Expert).
| Alifatisk wrote:
| There are of course better softwares than the Preview.app,
| but that's if you are willing to pay for it. Preview.app is
| free.
| whatisyour wrote:
| What about Okular?
| Alifatisk wrote:
| There is no support for redacting text properly on Okular.
| hyperthesis wrote:
| Adobe is expert at software standards. They aren't compulsive
| about control, yet don't give the farm away. The know when to
| be open and how much. That is how they dominate.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Could you give an example? PDF is an open standard controlled
| by ISO and has been for awhile.
| simondotau wrote:
| PDF has been a free-as-in-beer standard since 1993 and a free-
| as-in-speech ISO standard since 2008. The reality is that PDF
| is open, reliable, useful, feature rich, and widely accepted.
| It has no serious competitors.
|
| There's a reason why, unlike raster image formats, there aren't
| any serious competitors. The thing to realise about printed
| page file formats is that even if you set aside all of the
| silly "multimedia" and "interactivity" features, there's still
| a gargantuan rabbit hole of non-trivial features that need to
| be implemented absolutely perfectly, from kerning to spot
| color. PDF does it all very well. There's really no scope for a
| competitor to come along to make something that's obviously
| better.
| fuzztester wrote:
| >PDF has been a free-as-in-beer standard since 1993 and a
| free-as-in-speech ISO standard since 2008.
|
| Yes. The first sentence of the Wikipedia article about PDF
| is:
|
| >Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000,
| is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present
| documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner
| independent of application software, hardware, and operating
| systems.
|
| And the last sentence of the first paragraph of the same
| article is:
|
| >PDF was standardized as ISO 32000 in 2008.[5] The last
| edition as ISO 32000-2:2020 was published in December 2020. .
| izacus wrote:
| Especially since there's a PDF/A standard subset for
| archival, which makes those documents readable decades after
| any other format would rot.
| anon373839 wrote:
| Warning: Preview has a very, very nasty PDF-damaging bug. After
| applying a signature to a PDF in Preview, the searchable text
| layer becomes scrambled so that numbers are no longer
| searchable or copy-able. For example, "$745.25" would become
| something like "$;@EUR:-EUR". The document would still look
| correct, but you could not search for that figure or copy it
| out of the PDF without instead getting the garbled version.
| nadermx wrote:
| It's funny to see this #1 on HN. I have a PDF converter site[0]
| that I did a show hn [1] years back, and have been currently
| pushing updates too as I work on a entire site redesign since the
| PDF niche is massive. I'm alleviated to see that some one
| actually made a package for PDF to OCR[2]. And that they are
| using it[3]. It will finally make what I was doing less hacky.
|
| [0] https://www.pdf.to [1]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23238862 [2]
| https://github.com/ocrmypdf/OCRmyPDF [3]
| https://github.com/Frooodle/Stirling-PDF#technologies-used
| pmarreck wrote:
| No one commented yet on how this entire app was built by ChatGPT?
| sagarpatil wrote:
| Yep. That's the most interesting thing here. OP can you
| elaborate on how you got it to develop a full fledged
| application?
| Froodle wrote:
| So the whole app is not made in chatgpt It started like that
| 11 months ago though yes I made the website and 7 pdf
| operations with chatgpt as a test to investigate chatgpts
| power and applications Everything after that has been manual
| though and basically all the code has been changed by now
| mderazon wrote:
| I'm looking for a tool other than adobe pdf reader that lets me
| upload an image file of my signature to sign a pdf. Most of the
| tools I found let me draw a signature and I can't draw my
| signature on a track pad or with the mouse
| whatisyour wrote:
| Xournal++ does what you are looking for.
| voltaireodactyl wrote:
| PDF Expert is the best I've found that also does this, and
| while expensive, is a really robust and well done program.
| PDFpen also has this ability.
| ajot wrote:
| I use GIMP for that, and if I need it to look like printed-
| signed-scanned some ImageMagick incantation [0] or
| https://lookscanned.io/
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30024658
| thebiglebrewski wrote:
| Firefox can actually do this as long as your signature is in an
| image file.
| gpff wrote:
| I made myself such a tool: https://pdf.rere.re
|
| It's js only, nothing is sent to the server. It automatically
| makes the background of signatures transparent. The result is a
| raster pdf as if you printed, signed and scanned the document.
| I use it on desktop, not sure if it works well on phones.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Bluebeam PDF has an amazing Stapler tool. I can have a job that
| combines various pages of various PDF files and does a few other
| operations on them. When time for print comes, I run the job and
| output a PDF. For a kind of work that has to frequently put
| together various pages of various PDFs repeatedly to send as
| draft for review, this is a tool that makes life easy.
| https://support.bluebeam.com/articles/revu-21-revu-configure...
|
| However, I have yet to find an equivalent tool from any other PDF
| application. And that includes this one.
| zeagle wrote:
| Would be really interesting to use this with paperless-ngx to
| annotate or watermark documents.
| cryingpotato wrote:
| This is really neat! Is there a paid product backing this or
| planned for the future? I'm curious what motivates all the dev
| hours going into it.
| Froodle wrote:
| No paid backing, just running on donations at the moment. I am
| tempted to try add a paid feature for AI integration or
| something or some high end office features as I have a fair few
| offices that use this software now. But to be honest I would
| always want it free and it's just been a hobby
| ryloric wrote:
| Can this add paragraph numbers? I see page numbers in the README,
| but nothing on how I can number paragraphs.
| lukew3 wrote:
| Does anybody know of a similar foss suite of pdf tools that runs
| as a static site only using local javascript? I would prefer that
| to something like this.
| mrfumier wrote:
| But... why? WHY??
|
| Why would I run a docker container, a webserver, start a browser,
| navigate webpages... just to do some operations on a pdf locally?
|
| A few KiloBytes native program like PDFtk
| (https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/) does the
| job perfectly.
|
| I don't understand what is the point of bloating softwares like
| this. Not even speaking of the very bad consequences for the
| planet.
| ornornor wrote:
| A web app makes it cross platform. If you have a homelab,
| deploy it only once for every client.
|
| And PDFtk doesn't do annotations afaik which is a huge pain
| point on Linux (at least for me) because there are no
| applications that I know of to easily do things that are
| trivial on OSX like adding text or hand drawn signatures to
| PDFs. Masterpdf can do it but with a watermark and some
| limitations.
|
| Maybe it doesn't suit your particular use case but I wouldn't
| say pdftk can replace this project.
| adrenvi wrote:
| Firefox now has some simple built-in PDF editing tools. Text
| and images can be added on top, but existing text can't be
| modified.
| subtra3t wrote:
| I think edge would be perfect for you
| ornornor wrote:
| Edge the browser?
| subtra3t wrote:
| Yes, its pdf editor is very good.
| plugin-baby wrote:
| > no applications that I know of to easily do things that are
| trivial on OSX like adding text or hand drawn signatures to
| PDFs
|
| Try xournal++
| jraph wrote:
| Xournal++ was already mentionned, Okular also has annotations
| and I think adding hand drawn signatures.
|
| Though I welcome (new) work in this area.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| Because it's a simple (for me as the user) and reliable way to
| get a UI without having to send my personal files to some
| server somewhere. What's the big deal?
| chaps wrote:
| "does the job perfectly"
|
| Um. I work with PDFs a LOT and.. nah PDFtk is pretty weak. It
| doesn't even do OCR!
|
| This looks like a wonderful tool that solves a lot of problems
| that existing tools don't typically put together. It's an
| achievement, and your post is unnecessarily crass.
|
| This is very much the sort of tool that you host internally at
| a newsroom so journalists don't have to wrangle with software
| or write code. Like, in that situation, who cares if it's on
| top of docker? The users definitely won't give a shit.
|
| Please consider that you're not the target audience....
| ikurei wrote:
| It may not be right for you, but I can see situations where
| this would be preferable.
|
| If because of your job you find yourself doing these operations
| very often, and the ability to do them from several devices
| with different OSes is valuable, it might be great to throw
| this on a server.
|
| Or if your work has several people, may be not very technical
| folks, do them often. I've worked in a couple of places where
| this could've come in handy.
|
| Also, it includes an API. Also, being open source, if in the
| future you're creating a web app that needs some of these
| features, you could learn from/copy from its code.
|
| I think this is a good contribution to the world.
|
| > I don't understand what is the point of bloating softwares
| like this. Not even speaking of the very bad consequences for
| the planet.
|
| I partially share this concern. I wouldn't deploy this for
| myself unless I had a very easy way to stop it and start it,
| but anyway while not in use it it should only be consuming a
| bit of RAM, and there's plenty of very efficient hardware
| suitable for small servers these days.
| zelon88 wrote:
| lol, you think sending TCP packets of your 25mb PDF to Google,
| so they can send it back, so you can send it to Google again in
| an email attachment, so they can send it to another Google
| server to another Google user, so that user can download it and
| upload it to Google, so they can print it on an 8.5" x 11"
| piece of paper is saving the planet?
|
| You just sent how much wattage around the globe 100 times for
| what? To print the paper you already had on your screen?
|
| You sound like the kind of people who put their very important
| network documentation on Google Drive, so when your network
| goes down you have no way to access the information required to
| bring it back up. I'd rather have one engineer who knows the
| ins-and-outs of a LAMP stack than 10 who only know how to
| provision cloud VMs.
| rawling wrote:
| How did you get "sending it to Google" from
|
| > A few KiloBytes native program like PDFtk
| ungerik wrote:
| Because PDF is a minefield and PDFtk does not solve all
| problems on all platforms. You'll learn that if you try to
| process millions of PDFs in the wild that may or may not comply
| with any of the numerous specs.
| klysm wrote:
| The point of the bloat is that web is by far the easiest way to
| create a cross platform UI. It's far from ideal but that's the
| world we live in.
| Finnucane wrote:
| And for all that this does, it doesn't seem to touch any
| accessibility remediation problems.
| Ldorigo wrote:
| I'm surprised no one mentioned LibreOffice Draw - it doesn't
| always work perfectly (I guess it doesn't support some parts of
| the spec), but when it does, it's by far the most powerful pdf
| editor I found allowing to do things like move elements around,
| edit them (as in actually edit, not just annotate), etc. It's
| cross platform and FOSS.
|
| For page-level edits (rotating, reordering etc) pdftk in the cli
| (+ChatGPT to find the right incantations) works very well.
| dpacmittal wrote:
| Yeah, libreoffice draw and inkscape are usually my go to tools
| for editing pdf.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| inkscape works well for single pages.
|
| The problems with PDFs I encounter, however, are large scale
| 1000 page PDFs that compile PDFs from multiple sources that
| clearly have multiple different types of encodings, fonts,
| etc.
|
| I'd love to have a pipeline that properly 'shrinks'
| everything. Not sure thats what this thing does, but it looks
| like they're moving towards configuring pipelines that could
| get there.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| Smallpdf [1] probably deserves a mention here. Not OSS and not
| self-hosted, but I've used it occasionally and it has always
| worked really well. When I was running an agency, we inherited
| their first office - very cool folks.
|
| [1] https://smallpdf.com/
| buryat wrote:
| damn, that's a huge team
|
| https://smallpdf.com/about
| gnyman wrote:
| I'm not surprised... I mean just the the specification for
| PDF 1.7 is what ~1300 pages ?
|
| And then there is 2.0, and all the extensions [1]
|
| And multiply that with the number of implementations.
|
| If the goal is to make something that "always" works, you
| probably need a big team to keep up with the moving field of
| various bugs and reimplementations
|
| [1] https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd0
| 000...
| marwis wrote:
| Looks like the pdf-lib.js used by the project can do most of the
| advertised features right in the browser and there is even a wasm
| build of tesseract out there.
|
| Have you considered making serverless/browser-only version?
| Froodle wrote:
| Yes our v2 version we are working on is this! We plan to
| completely migrate functionality to be all client with a server
| side one for API requests as well
| nirav72 wrote:
| Any recommendations for a desktop/cli PDF optimization tool that
| will reduce the size of a pdf? I've tried few and the best one so
| far is the one that is included in the subscription version of
| Adobe Acrobat. But I only need it occasionally and is not worth
| paying $20/month sub.
| aidos wrote:
| Ghostscript maybe? Depends on what you're doing but it can
| downsample images etc.
| nirav72 wrote:
| Yes, its mainly to reduce image size for scanned documents.
| I'll give Ghostscript a try.
| aidos wrote:
| Something like this is probably a good starting point:
| ghostscript -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4
| -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH
| -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf
|
| From this gist https://gist.github.com/guifromrio/6390547#
| nirav72 wrote:
| Very helpful tip. Thank you! - Ran it through GS and I
| got 30% reduction in a 50mb pdf file. I think if I play
| around with some options - such as converting images to
| grayscale, I might be able to reduce it by another
| 10-20%.
| mijoharas wrote:
| I guess it depends on your document, but I'm surprised
| you only get that much compression. For scanned to pdf
| documents I often get orders of magnitude.
|
| I'm not at my computer, but try messing with the
| `/printer` in the above command, there are other options,
| (possibly `/ebook`?) that control the compression ratio
| from memory.
| evrflx wrote:
| Did you already give ghostscript a try?
| mpweiher wrote:
| If you're on a Mac, (my) PdfCompress is fairly smart about
| doing a good job.
|
| Haven't updated it in while though... :-/
| senjin wrote:
| I recently found out Mac's built in Preview app can do this. Go
| to export then change the Quartz Filter to "Reduce File Size"
| nf3 wrote:
| As long as I can fill in forms and add a signature I'm sold. I
| loved being able to do this on MacOS but now that I'm on Linux I
| still haven't found any app that can do this.
| thebiglebrewski wrote:
| Firefox can actually do this as long as your signature is in an
| image file.
| c0mbonat0r wrote:
| reminds me of smallpdf.com but open source
| tbarbe wrote:
| I did a small only-front app for that, it's open source if you
| want to check it (disclaimer: im not a front end dev, the ui is
| not good) https://timothebarbe.github.io/pdfModer/
| codethief wrote:
| Are there any plans to offer a CLI, as well?
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