philjohnsonMar 29

Show HN: BreezePDF – Free, in-browser PDF editor

BreezePDF lets you edit, sign, merge, compress, redact, OCR, fill forms, extract tables, and use 30+ more PDF tools — all in the browser, no sign-up. Files never leave your computer.

I built it because when people search Google for common PDF tasks, many of the tools they find upload documents to a server. I wanted an option that keeps files local instead.

I posted an earlier version on HN last spring:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43880962

At the time it only supported a small set of features. Over the last 10 months I rebuilt large parts of it and expanded it to nearly 40 tools, including several ideas that came from comments in that earlier thread.

There is also now a desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux, plus a CLI/SDK for developers.

https://breezepdf.com/?v=3

Show HN: Free, in-browser PDF editor | Hacker News

Show threadk310

This may be outside your plan, but I really could use a pdf editor that makes Internet Archive book scans more readable.

Apparently, the scanner(s) adopt some compromise setting that renders halftones OK, but gives all text a "dishwater gray" background.

If there are few pictures, I run the PDF through a quartz filter in Preview to threshold the text and later merge graphics pages with the "contact sheet" view from an un-threshold-ed image in Preview.app. This is slow and tedious.

Of course, computers are "smart," so they tell me, and should be able to recognize a picture from a block of text on the same page and render each one appropriately.

I used to do such editing of really important documents (like ads for pioneer computer products and gizmos like GENIAC and such)[0] pretty much by hand, splitting a PDF, if needed, into multiple images and hand/batch editing, then merging again.

I could use ImageMagick ... but it's not adaptive, as described above.

Geniac ad sample (imgbb.com)

[0] https://i.ibb.co/67zpBDgh/OIP-2472099845.jpg

Mar 29 at 3:33pmWeb
Show threadphiljohnsonMar 29
Neat idea. Basically an "Enhance Readability" button. I'm looking into how it can be done, will report back.