Show HN: PDF Assembler – client-side PDF editing
2 by dschnelldavis | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Here's a neat hack I made recently to do basic PDF editing directly in a browser—without having to upload anything to a server. I was initially looking for a way to do simple PDF modification (extracting pages, merging, and adding page numbers). There are some good server-side tools for this (QPDF, PDFTk, PDFBox, iText, Hummus), but for better speed and privacy I really wanted a 100% client-side solution. There are a few good JavaScript PDF libraries for reading and displaying PDFs (pdf.js) and creating PDFs from scratch (jsPDF, PDFKit), but I couldn't find any for editing existing PDFs. So, I did what any self-respecting hacker would do, and rolled my own. :-) Actually, I found out that Mozilla's pdf.js solved half the problem, as it does an excellent job disassembling PDF files. So all I had to do was figure out a way to put them back together again. The result is PDF Assembler, now available on GitHub and NPM. I also put together a demonstration site ( https://ift.tt/2vi9f7s ) which shows some examples of what it can do. I know PDF Assembler still needs some tweaking, but I think the basic idea is sound, and so far I've been pretty happy with how it works. Please take a look and let me know what you think. Thanks! Links: PDF Assembler (demonstration site) - https://ift.tt/2vi9f7s PDF Assembler (GitHub) - https://ift.tt/2JHxDTi PDF Assembler (NPM) - https://ift.tt/2vi9v6q pdf.js - https://ift.tt/22ozJdN jsPDF - https://ift.tt/PXU03V PDFKit - ( https://ift.tt/1jFobNk QPDF - https://ift.tt/17gu4dg PDFTk - https://ift.tt/2JJzSpl PDFBox - https://ift.tt/1p2PZBy iText - https://ift.tt/YQiOWw Hummus - https://ift.tt/2vi9yPE
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