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/
First thing is it was released much after BreezePDF was.
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.
> 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.
Show HN is show your product. That's what I'm doing. It's not an open source forum. The only shilling is mentioning other products on someone else's post...
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).
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.
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.
If you ever need a backend for storing the edited PDFs, FilePost (https://filepost.dev) could handle that. One API call to upload and you get a permanent CDN URL back. Could be a good complement for a "save and share" feature.
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.
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.
46 comments
Unless BreezePDF is open source, (it is not) it is in violation of MuPDFs AGPL license.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47556806
https://artifex.com/licensing
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.
> 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.
> 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
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).
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47555636
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
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?
App: https://easyinvoicepdf.com
GitHub: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf
- 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
helveticaand is automatically applied to the selected text once clicked and there is no way to undo or fix it.