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.
Unless BreezePDF is open source, (it is not) it is in violation of MuPDFs AGPL license.
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.
You could make the same argument with Adobe or any other PDF software. Why doesn't everyone use all use BentoPDF? Things like brand, and simply what shows up when they search on Google are factors.
Also, Bento doesn't have a desktop app a regular person can download. You have to download the GitHub. Non-developers won't do that.
Additionally, each tool is separate. It's not all in one editor. That's a UX consideration. BreezePDF, everything is in one editor interface. It added a lot of development complexity but makes the UX better in my opinion.
I tried Bento and some of their tools are very slow, cause of large downloads to the client. BreezePDF is much faster.
Good for them making an open source tool though. Lots of options out there and everyone can choose for themselves.
You are shilling your stuff at a wrong place, I think. Better apply to YC or, I dunno, go public. Also add some nice catch phrases (e.g. "Blazing Fast", "Production Ready") and emojis here and there.
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
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).
What you are offering is NOT a free tool -- it is a demo, for a tool for which you are charging $12/month. No reasonable person would interpret a grand total of 3 exports as enough to justify calling this a "free" tool.
This is to say nothing of your violation of AGPL on the use of MuPDF, which has been pointed out here and elsewhere.
But of course, you're free to Show HN a paid product; just kindly don't insult our collective intelligences in the process.
Commonly known as a "free trial"
Imagine a pizza place where you can try three slices for free before you order one?
Or that you can make a pizza at the shop, add and remove topping as you wish until you're satisfied?
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)
[1]: https://scantailor.org/ [2]: https://github.com/scantailor/scantailor [3]: https://github.com/4lex4/scantailor-advanced
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?
Regarding your concern, if a manipulation of the PDF doesn't meet the standard specification, it won't render properly in a PDF viewer as it is in the present day, let alone in 20 years. All PDF viewers/editors worth their salt adhere to the PDF spec. So as long as the PDF specification stays the same, anything that renders correctly now in a PDF viewer will render correctly in the future.
For something like compression, if the file reduces in size and the PDF renders the same (minus expected potential minor quality loss), then you have evidence right there that it worked successfully.
I built BreezePDF with PDF spec adhering libraries, so everything should be up to standards.
Let me know if that answers your question!
- 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.
In what scenario was undo not working? If you can provide that context, I can dig into it more as to what wasn't undoing properly.
For text editing, I see the issue with that for some of the fonts. Fixing now
Sorry for the trouble!
The desktop app is only 58mb and uses effectively zero CPU, so it's about as far from bloatware as you can get.
Shoot me an email at joe@breezepdf.com — happy to jump on a call and walk you through it before you get it for your company.
Some features took a longggg time to do, such as table extraction, text editing, and (surprisingly) preserving positioning of elements (text, images etc.) when rotating the page in the downloaded file - PDF specification has a different orientation system than the web, so this was very intricate to get correct.
A lot of PDF editors have tools that all work independently, meaning you have to use each tool separately. My decision to add all the features I did while keeping it in one editor was because I felt that was a better user experience, but I means that all features become intertwined, which added a ton of complexity managing that.
