[HN Gopher] Show HN: Nano PDF - A CLI Tool to Edit PDFs with Gem...
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Show HN: Nano PDF - A CLI Tool to Edit PDFs with Gemini's Nano
Banana
The new Gemini 3 Pro Image model (aka Nano Banana) is incredible at
generating slides, so I thought it would be fun to build a CLI tool
that lets you edit PDF presentations using plain English. The tool
converts the page you want to edit into an image, sends it to the
model API together with your prompt to generate an edited image,
then converts the updated image back and stitches into the original
document. Examples: - `nano-pdf edit deck.pdf 5 "Update the
revenue chart to show Q3 at $2.5M"` - `nano-pdf add deck.pdf 15
"Create an executive summary slide with 5 bullet points"`
Features: - Edit multiple pages in parallel - Add entirely new
slides that match your deck's style - Google Search enabled by
default so the model can look up current data - Preserves text
layer for copy/paste and search It can work with any kind of PDF
but I expect it would be most useful for a quick edit to a deck or
something similar. GitHub: https://github.com/gavrielc/Nano-PDF
Author : GavCo
Score : 55 points
Date : 2025-11-29 20:44 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| lxe wrote:
| This is nuts and I absolutely love this. So you convert the PDF
| into image, edit the image, then convert the image back into a
| PDF.
| treetalker wrote:
| I'd love to see clearer examples: a video, or original pdf /
| command / result pdf. Very cool!
| sultson wrote:
| How cool! It's frustrating how tedious many PDF workflows still
| are. I've been building something similar in this space[0], but
| web-based where you visually specify the area to edit. The
| biggest issue for now is the cost per edit as the Pro version
| amounts to roughly $0.15/image. However, with some finessing, the
| original Nano Banana seems to do a great job as well. Have you
| explored UI-based approaches yourself by any chance?
|
| [0]https://docusera.com/
| itsmevictor wrote:
| Very nice! I wonder whether that could be used to get LLMs to
| annotate pdfs. Say an "agentic" CLI like Claude Code or Gemini-
| cli reviews a pdf and finds typos, could it use this to annotate
| the pdf like underlining them in red or something of that sort?
| That could be nice.
| mentalgear wrote:
| Nice - but consider adding an animated screengrap like:
| https://github.com/pythops/oryx
| yoavm wrote:
| Please don't add an animated gif to your README. Nothing worse
| than an autoplaying video with no controls, that has 10 frames
| but takes 5.4MB to download. Github supports normal video
| files. It allows the user to rewind or pause, and it results in
| a much smaller file size.
| tecoholic wrote:
| > Converts an image to a single-page PDF with a hidden text layer
| using Tesseract. This is the 'State Preservation' step.
|
| Does this mean the text only pdf page is transformed into an
| image that covers the full page, but the text is still under
| there. So, any machine based extraction would still get the text,
| but would probably loose all the bounding box information and
| regular users cannot just use their mouse to select text anymore?
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| I recently tried to change a single word in a PDF and nearly tore
| my hair out (thank you LibreOffice) I'll definitely keep this in
| mind for next time, thank you.
| tkfoss wrote:
| Try photopea next time
| shevis wrote:
| A side effect of replacing entire pages with images is that the
| file size will expand dramatically. Most PDFs only contain a
| couple of images
| John7878781 wrote:
| Love this.
|
| After several iterations of edits, would the image quality
| decrease?
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(page generated 2025-11-29 23:00 UTC)