Show HN: Pdfwithlove – PDF tools that run 100% locally (no uploads, no back end)

Seems like Clientside PDF editors are the new "hello world" app these days. From the last couple months on Show HN alone:

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209627

Was this done heavily LLM assisted? Especially the PDF Edit tools have user-interaction quirks and bugs that a human developer would catch immediately during the regular manual testing when developing.

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.

How does it fare with PDFs consisting entirely of images? Any PDF tool was struggling with compressing a passport scan (made with iPhone so might've contributed somehow, knowing Apple and PDFs) I had to cut down in size. Ended up using ImageMagick cause any Ghostscript based tool couldn't get it below 7 MBs from the original 28MB which, although, pretty good, was still too high and I could tell there was still plenty of detail that could be discarded without losing the eligibility of the document. I had to compress it with ImageMagick at the end, cut it down from 28MB to 3MB.

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 ?

For my hard sci-fi novel, I wanted people to give me feedback by annotating the PDF directly. Since I didn't know what local PDF editors they had available, I decided to vibe-code a web-based PDF annotation editor using PDF.js. (Yes, malicious users could have a field day by guessing the URLs.) It's pretty rough:

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!

I wonder why everything now is written in web frameworks. Meanwhile I am currently using macos which has a magnificent PDF tool called... Preview. It allows annotate, merge, realign pages, insert one page from another document or even a JPEG-scan, etc.

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?

Me and my buddy run a small indie dev studio, and a while back we got frustrated with how most PDF scanner apps feel — clunky UX, subscriptions everywhere, ads, and in some cases your documents get uploaded who-knows-where (for example, incidents reported leaks by TechRadar and Fox News).

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.

The "source" link at the footer seems to point to the author's GitHub profile, not source repository. The repo under it contains no code either.

I developed an aversion to "with love"-marketing. I've seen too many products come full circle from idealistic "ad-free-forever" "will-never-sell-your-data" "open-source-forever" "customer-first" student-times to selling out everything.

I'm hoping one of these efforts will lead to local translation of PDFs. Anyone aware of one? Not local, but the best I've found is using Google Translate via camera/images.

Seeing it on GitHub I thought there was source code so that I can self-host it. Unfortunately that’s not the case :( Really nice project btw!

Doesn't a time-tested solution already exist in the form of PDF24?

Great work, thanks for sharing and congrats on the launch!

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

There's a problem with i18n on the landing page, set my browser to German I see things like "home.alternative_title". Tbh I'm not sure such a site needs i18n at all, Claude was a bit overzealous there ;)

> make millions

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?

I haven't used anything else since I've found PDFGear. Have it installed on all my devices. Still surprised it isn't more known.

Great job! If it's all on client you should make a PWA out of it so it can be installed and used offline.

Built a client only webapp myself and offline usage is the main thing users ask about.

This is a scam made by AI. Avoid at all costs.

How does it compare to stirling pdf?

I am old. Back in my day we called this... an app

MacOS preview tool will do most of this.

what library are you using on the client side to convert from pdf to word?

All of these are already (and have already been available) for ages on linux

Might be better to provide a downloadable executable instead of asking the user to trust that the browser isn't doing what the browser was designed to do.

makes it difficult to verify that it runs locally. unobfuscated source is not available. important actions, like open a PDF, save edited PDF, will be stuck or error if you cut the internet after opening the site and only unstuck after you reenable internet. I get it's probably for speed

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.

Feels like infringing on the ILovePDF trademark. (Backpiggying on an established brand to make it look like you are affiliated, or the actual brand)

Good work! I do like that the tools are task centric and that means I don"t have to handle all sorts of things, I just quickly learn the three to four tools that I really need (as a person working in the real world). #pareto

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.

Oh cool.

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