[HN Gopher] Stirling PDF: Self-hosted, web-based PDF manipulatio...
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Stirling PDF: Self-hosted, web-based PDF manipulation tool
Author : gitinit
Score : 272 points
Date : 2024-05-02 23:56 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| anotherhue wrote:
| > 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.
| nolongerthere wrote:
| so do we trust it?
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| The claim, or the software? If the software was developed by
| ChatGPT it probably sucks. If it wasn't developed by ChatGPT,
| its author is a liar. So either way, fuck it.
| secfirstmd wrote:
| Who cares if it was developed by ChatGPT if it actually
| works? Why not try it out first before crapping on
| someone's hard Open Source work?
| langnutty wrote:
| PDF software / readers are reliably the least reliable,
| most likely to have security issues programs on any given
| machine. I for one would not run C code blindly copied
| from ChatGPT carelessly.
|
| In this case I think the actual PDF bits are command line
| tools written by humans though, and just the web wrapping
| (some small initial piece of it) is originally from
| ChatGPT.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| Yeah let me waste a shitload of time on possible low-
| quality shit that might have spyware. Based on the
| advertisement I'm not convinced. I want PDF tools
| developed by experts, not monkeys pounding on keyboards
| or shysters who push stupid gimmicks.
| atoav wrote:
| 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.
| franga2000 wrote:
| 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 developers.
| jpnc wrote:
| I wonder what the point of that sentence is - to get picked up
| by HN? Kinda like how any product or service even tangentially
| related to data suddenly has 'by the way also AI and stuff'
| added somewhere on their landing page. You don't see 'Developed
| using intellisense' used in READMEs.
| exe34 wrote:
| You do see "sent from my iPhone"
| arthurcolle wrote:
| That's amazing. What a time to be alive.
| BonusPlay wrote:
| For me it means:
|
| 1) don't expose it to public internet
|
| 2) don't give it untrusted input
|
| Which highly reduces the usability factor for me.
| frooodle wrote:
| 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
| neitsab wrote:
| 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!
| llagerlof wrote:
| When I saw this project months ago I instant loved it. I
| installed and start using it for real and... I found many bugs.
| Some tools were unusable.
|
| I really hope it's better now.
| haidev wrote:
| How is this entirely developed by ChatGPT? Does the author claim
| that all the code in there was generated by ChatGPT?
| frooodle wrote:
| 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
| figmert wrote:
| 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?
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| 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 <redacted> for profit companies in
| the Document-manipulating/signing/storing still exist outside of
| niche industries (healthcare, govt, law) that require audit-
| trails and other regulatory specifics. I guess SEO still rules..
| If anyone wants to make some money call up all the biggest real
| estate firms in your area and ask them how much they spend on
| contract signing or related services (it's a lot) and then offer
| them to do this for half the amount ( I can sign 20-30k documents
| for <$100 a month, and could be cheaper probably) Your average
| real estate firm is paying .50c-$1 a signature if they are
| uninformed, there's a lot of the uninformed.
| cess11 wrote:
| Manipulation and signing is the easy part. Robust storage,
| retrieval and deletion aren't so easy.
|
| Reputation often matters more than price in this area, because
| the pricey services amount to peanuts compared to the business
| as a whole. It's like doing price optimisation on toilet paper
| in the office. And reputation is generally interpreted as a
| proxy for reliability and a guarantee that there will be
| someone to sue if things go bad.
| jiriro wrote:
| Could you please elaborate how do you sign 10k documents for
| $100/month?
| n3storm wrote:
| I hope they will add digital signing with certificates
| capabilities.
| exe34 wrote:
| I guess you could reverse proxy with nginx?
| atoav wrote:
| As you probably should?
| nip wrote:
| Out of curiosity (and self interest [1]), what is your use case
| for digital signing and verification?
|
| My understanding is that it's more about trust (Docusign being
| the leader) than anything else: one can provide certificate
| signing and verification, but the trust in the owner of the
| certificate is the crux of the matter
|
| [1] I'm the developer behind SimplePDF.eu
| emarsden wrote:
| 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 Content-Security-Policy
| for instance)?
|
| This is a concrete problem when deploying apps that need the user
| to "upload" some sensitive content.
| TheCapeGreek wrote:
| That's a problem with just about any package, library or system
| you use in the end.
|
| Open source runs in a large amount of trust, and we're all
| complicit.
| emarsden wrote:
| Sure, but these types of applications are running in a web
| browser sandbox, which benefits from enormous engineering
| resources to protect the host computer from malicious actions
| by the remote code. I'm wondering whether this execution
| environment (augmented with some policy mechanism to allow
| apps to declare their URL access needs, a little like an
| AppArmor or network firewal policy) could also provide some
| guarantees concerning privacy or information security.
| huygens6363 wrote:
| Little snitch[1] can help you out when self-hosting. When not
| self-hosting, all bets are off and my default stance is "expect
| the worst".
|
| [1] https://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html
|
| Edit: LS is MacOS oriented. I'm sure there are others, but I'm
| not into it. I feel it should be an OS-level feature, but who
| am I.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| > LS is MacOS oriented
|
| There's opensnitch on Linux. There's also something similar
| on Windows but I don't remember what it's called.
| apexalpha wrote:
| 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.
| emarsden wrote:
| 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).
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > in particular when the app does need to make some web
| requests to operate
|
| A web app doesn't need to make an outbound web requests to
| operate. A user interacting with a web is the one initiating
| the requests.
|
| You can give the access to the up through a HTTP proxy and you
| can filter out any outbound requests from the web app or even
| not configuring the network routing for the server hosting that
| app. That leaves you with only JS initiated requests in the
| rendered pages of the app.
| arcastroe wrote:
| If you're self-hosting on kubernetes, you can set up network
| policies with deny-all egress rule for this deployment/pod.
| This would block all outward network calls.
| mstijak wrote:
| Working on a product that could be similarily described.
|
| CxReports: Self-hosted, web-based PDF reporting tool.
|
| https://www.cx-reports.com
| sidcool wrote:
| The test coverage is pretty low. I'm raising a PR for this. Code
| quality not the best.
| exac wrote:
| Well it was developed initially by ChatGPT. First file I open I
| see repeated comments.
|
| https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF/blob/7f577a60...
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| I see it uses pdfbox and pdf.js, so I assume it's mainly a frond
| end of these tools?
| Beijinger wrote:
| At least it is open source. It never hurts to have something web
| based but I prefer an application. I use a commercial product for
| Linux. Master PDF Editor. It is good, but their copy protection
| sucks. Better don't forget to "deregister" ist before wiping your
| harddrive, otherwise your code won't work. But there is always
| customer service....
| franga2000 wrote:
| I generally agree, but I also very often need to quickly do
| something basic to a PDF from my phone (like split a 2-column
| layout to single-column so it's actually readable) or when
| doing something on someone else's computer and little web tools
| like this are great for that.
|
| And yes, Master PDF Editor is an amazing piece of software! It
| makes creating PDF forms so easy that every time I get a PDF to
| fill out, I make it a form and send back an empty copy too so
| whoever sent it to me can use that instead. I've gotten a few
| smaller organisations to start using mine instead.
| petepete wrote:
| 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.
| babox wrote:
| me tooo
| moritzruth wrote:
| The last minor release of paperless-ngx added merging,
| splitting and rotating.
|
| Source: https://docs.paperless-ngx.com/changelog/#paperless-
| ngx-270
| petepete wrote:
| Ah thanks. I'd actually updated but didn't read the changelog
| and hadn't noticed the new functionality!
| Odenwaelder wrote:
| The latest version of paperless-ngx can rotate documents. Check
| it out!
| petepete wrote:
| Perfect timing, thank you.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Ouch. Rotate the document in a pdf reader. And Print to pdf.
| maweki wrote:
| 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.
| smartmic wrote:
| > ... 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.
| maweki wrote:
| 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.
| nashashmi wrote:
| You should just get a perpetual license to a PDF tool for $70.
| Best money ever spent. And get a portable exe version too.
| ziddoap wrote:
| They seem to have a working solution that they, and their
| wife, is happy with. Why should they spend money on a
| different solution?
| nashashmi wrote:
| 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.
| sodality2 wrote:
| Counterpoint: A web service is one thing to maintain that
| then works on all devices, including mobile. A PDF tool
| needs to be installed.
| nashashmi wrote:
| That is a good point in the world of ipad, android, and
| iphone. But did you know that iOS has most of these
| features built in? I just discovered this now.
| nirav72 wrote:
| 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.
| GlacierFox wrote:
| Anyone got an alternative that wasn't developed entirely in
| ChatGPT?
| shiftingleft wrote:
| Looking at a few files, there's definitely some generated
| comments in there. Do you have any method to quantify how much
| of it is (likely) generated?
| Alifatisk wrote:
| On mac, the preview app.
|
| On Windows, okular. But honestly, pirating Acrobat is the best
| way if you have a tough economy.
| cjblomqvist wrote:
| 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)
| tyre wrote:
| The creator is in the comments, it wasn't entirely developed
| with ChatGPT. The first spike in 24h was. The rest of the past
| year of development was human.
| siva7 wrote:
| > Originally developed entirely by ChatGPT
|
| I would be careful with such wording as one could easily come to
| the conclusion that this tool was developed by the ChatGPT team.
| Nevertheless that this software certainly wasn't entirely
| developed by ChatGPT which is technically not possible but WITH
| the assistance of an AI tool.
| kapildev wrote:
| On the topic of PDFs, one thing I have always wondered is why
| there aren't any OpenSource pdf editors that are comparable to
| Adobe or Foxit. Does anyone know?
| tiahura wrote:
| Probably for the same reason there aren't any OpenSource
| comparables to Word, Excel, Outlook, Autocad, Quickbooks, or
| any other flagship productivity software
| snadal wrote:
| Not the same thing.
|
| - Libreoffice can edit Word and Excel files.
|
| - There are several tools to read a PST file. Anyway... pst
| files are not commonly being shared with other people so the
| need to accessing it is uncommon unless you already use
| outlook.
|
| - Autocad and Quickbooks are far less used (less people) than
| PDF.
|
| I also wonder why there are no more tools to edit PDF files.
| Maybe licensing issues?
|
| Edit: formatting
| tiahura wrote:
| _Not the same thing.
|
| - Libreoffice can edit Word and Excel files._
|
| You are correct. Just because Libreoffice can mangle a docx
| file doesn't make them truly comparable.
|
| emacs can edit a .sqlite file, but they aren't comparable.
|
| The issue is the insanely massive investment needed to
| build and sustain a project with millions of lines of code
| for something that isn't particularly sexy.
| showerst wrote:
| 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.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| 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 LibreOffice or
| poppler to sign, you'll struggle to obtain certs that will
| validate without spending an arm and a leg.
|
| I really hope that someone will decide to step in and become the
| Let's Encrypt of PDF and S/MIME certs, because that will improve
| public trust significantly.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _you 'll struggle to obtain certs that will validate_
|
| You'll be surprised how far you can go pasting a picture of
| your signature in Preview.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| Absolutely, and that's what I tend to do with my documents
| IRL, but I think it would be really nice if we could move to
| a world where signing documents digitally actually meant
| something more than `signature.png`.
|
| In the EU, in order to have a legal guarantee of being
| treated as the same as a handwritten signature in all member
| states, you have to meet "Qualified Electronic Signature"
| level, which means cryptographic signatures and the
| involvement of some kind of trust services provider who
| validates the certificate used to sign. In practice this is
| rare, and ordinary electronic signatures a la Preview work
| for most things.
| yencabulator wrote:
| > involvement of some kind of trust services provider
|
| Marketplace at least in the US has shown that once you have
| this, the actual cryptography really doesn't matter. All
| anyone seems to care about seems to be "We are company X
| and have been doing this business for Y years and here's
| our standard operating policy. We emailed address A at time
| T1 and the person reading that email address used our
| online services to electronically 'sign' the pdf P at time
| T2."
|
| Everyone trusts Adobe/Dropbox/et al to make that claim,
| nobody cares about certificates and what not.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| 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.
| tacocataco wrote:
| One of firefox's more recent updates added a PDF editor.
|
| I think people's perception of forefox is from several versons
| ago. As a daily user throughout its history, Firefox has made
| alot of progress over the years IMO.
|
| Give it another shot if it's been a while.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| Is there a PDF templating tool that lets you GUI modify elements
| on a PDF to be used to generate reports and invoices for example
| ?
|
| Backend has Python and preferably agpl
| bustedagain wrote:
| Can someone convert this mumble jumble of docker api endpoint
| locally environment into a working software that people can
| actually install and use on their pc/mac/phone???
|
| This seems too complicated to perform simple tasks of split merge
| edit not to mention the GBs of space docker and dependencies will
| take.
|
| Thank you
| Jackson_Fleck wrote:
| I'm not sure if this uses unoconv with LibreOffice but my heart
| goes out to anyone trying to develop Pdf/document manipulation
| tools with the current Python libraries. A thankless task.
|
| The more you work on this stuff the more you hate proprietary
| formats as well as having to rely on open source repos operated
| at the whim of a few good people.
| junto wrote:
| I'm looking at the list and trying to figure out if there is an
| API to extract the text from a PDF? Or retrieve it as vectors /
| embeddings?
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