alt Hacker NewsShow 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.
Comments
Notice the IMO poor behavior of the author on the previous thread. [1] Search for 'philjohnson'. This post removes the contentious word "free" but still does not convey that no sign-up is required but you are apparently limited to 3 files without signup. Reading the previous thread was a turn-off enough for me to warn you.
For those looking for an MIT alternative, there's an embeddable solution which uses PDFium (Apache) compiled to wasm instead of MuPDF (AGPL): https://www.embedpdf.com/
There's a hosted version for quick edits: https://app.embedpdf.com/
Discussion from several months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44901683
Neither fully handles XFA, but that's a perennial struggle.
I don't want to hijack the thread but isn't BentoPDF open source and does all that and more for free? https://www.bentopdf.com
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)
Note that this "free" PDF editor uses MuPDF under the hood which uses an AGPL license with the desktop version is being commercial.
Unless BreezePDF is open source, (it is not) it is in violation of MuPDFs AGPL license.
Love it! Bookmarked for the next time I need to sign a PDF and then will pony up the $$.
Is this a viable alternative to the Adobe PDF app on Windows? I'm looking for an alternative for our company to replace Adobe's bloatware.
I tried it. Looks great. Just few refinements from my side.
- Undo is not working. If you applied something it will be done. I had to reupload the pdf to again make the changes.
- I tried the text editing, it is having a defualt font family of `helvetica` and is automatically applied to the selected text once clicked and there is no way to undo or fix it.
Nice tool. I like the local approach. I think a nice feature would be to remove all PII from documents, so that users can redact PDFs and upload to their favourite LLM.
Great idea, though I haven't had a chance to use it much (yet). I especially appreciate the end-user control of the documents - that they never leave the user's computer. A question for any newish PDF application developer:
A valuable feature of PDFs is wide and long compability. What I output now should be fully readable and usable on any system and in 20 or maybe 50 years. [0]
How do you have confidence that what you implement meets that specification? For example, if I edit the text, how do you know BreezePDF isn't subtley corrupting it? If I compress or flatten it, how do you know that about the output?
In fairness, it's a question for any file-based application, but PDF has a special status in it's universal availability and functionality.
[0] Is the timeframe in the spec somewhere?
Some discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47555636
Well, all the agents, including free and even local ones could do this for less money and without AGPL violations.
Just tell them what you need to change/merge and they literally do it just fine. Or they could write reusable python/whatever scripts for you.
These days $12/month for a vibe-coded PDF editor running locally is a robbery.
Also, let me quote:
> BentoPDF (12.3k stars): https://github.com/alam00000/bentopdf
> PDFCraft (3.6k stars): https://github.com/PDFCraftTool/pdfcraft
> PDFLince (31 stars): https://github.com/GSiesto/pdflince
1) Not free, also violates AGPL license
2) Please don't call black overlay rectangles as "Redact" - it is maliciously misleading. I checked https://pdfcrowd.com/inspect-pdf/ and I see original parts that I covered with these rectangles (images are stored twice: as originals and as images with cut out regions).