Show HN: I made a simple PDF text editor
simpdf.com
simpdf.com
> Edit pdf like a word doc while preserving structure and format.
While I'm sure there are cases where this works pretty well and can be very useful, it may be worth noting that -- just like every other tool in this space -- there will be many PDFs where it simply can't work. It'll be hugely dependent on exactly how the PDF-generating application/tool went about things.
One simple example: suppose your PDF uses a specific font (not one of the standards like Times or Helvetica), so the PDF-generating tool embedded the font. (This is common.) Further, suppose the generating tool embedded a re-encoded subset of the font, including only the glyphs that were actually required. (This is also common.)
Now, suppose the edit you wish to make involves adding a character that was not present in the original document -- let's say you want to change the date from "May" to "June". But the original document contained no occurrences of capital J (in this particular font/style), and so the capital J glyph is not present in the embedded font. No "PDF text editor" can get around this; the best you can hope for is a "J" in some fallback (such as Times) that may look terrible alongside the intended custom font.
And as for edits that would require reflowing multiple lines of text, maybe inserting a new paragraph in the middle of a page, etc.... not much chance of this working out well.
Yes, a tool like this can (in many cases) make it possible to make minor changes (perhaps fixing a typo or updating a word here and there). To suggest that it can "edit pdf like a word doc" seems patently false to me.
What's so hard about PDF text extraction? https://www.filingdb.com/pdf-text-extraction
In a nutshell, PDF is fundamentally different than MS Word: it's a standard for visual layout, without notions of paragraphs or even words.
As OP said, it doesn't mean the tool is useless. It could quite often come handy for myself.
That the rendering of the document on screen is paramount as opposed to ability to manipulate the text itself. "These characters should be displayed at this position in the document precisely"
It would make sense that exporting the document as HTML or Word would make this easier - as these document formats have different goals.
Figuring out more global properties like multi-column layouts and reflowing text is a much harder problem.
PS: I was once forwarded an application for someone who was supposed to replace me, and I had to interview them. The expected salary was hidden by placing a gray rectangle over it. I removed it using inkscape and saw the expected salary was 30% higher than what I made.
Inkscape Link: https://inkscape.org/
Glade someone brought it. For most common tasks is there really a point even using Photoshop and Illustrator now days? Especially with the cloud direction they are moving towards.
I don't agree with you that it sucks.
Think not just about now or one year from now, but 10 years, 20, 50 years from now, 100 years? Open format and open source software is much desired for creation based software. There is the paradox of the making money for the open source software, and I don't have an answer for that. Seems like some kind of sliding scale payment will be needed for these software. May be also some kind of sliding scale payment for eventual money earned form the software up to a limit.
Or is the fact that the company is going ahead with interviewing them, a sign that they may be willing to pay that figure?
Would love to have a tool like this that worked for making new invoices, among other things!
Not the same in US?
I don't think laws are ever that prescriptive about what you have to do. As far as I know, the only requirement is when the tax inspector arrives, you need to be able to produce a complete and accurate list of all invoices you have ever sent to customers.
The Finnish VAT Act does, however, require that companies sending and receiving invoices ensure that the mandatory invoice data is not modified after issuance (209 g §).
Most likely, the PDF used a subsetted embedded bold font, so it only worked for letters that happened to be present in the original text; any new letters were missing from the font and you got a fallback.
Just one of many reasons why a tool like this is the wrong way to approach pretty much any document creation/editing task, because PDF is the wrong document format to use for these purposes.
Wow, that seems to be exactly right, based on which letters were bold and which weren't. Very interesting!
To the folks downthread who asked about the legality of modifying invoices, I was trying to use one invoice as a template for a second invoice. Most things are the same, so it would have been great if I could have made a simple change!
and it appears as if it would probably run anything you put between ; and # (in this case it will echo hi). Unless the filename is sanitized, which it appears to not be.
Btw, arbitrary code execution vuln here, OP.
...or not as much as The Gimp, at least.
It is super lightweight and opens any complex PDF. Can insert signatures, can edit anything in the PDF (without changing the font even if the font is embedded in the PDF—as long as all the glyphs you are typing are present in the font), etc. My only complaint is that it won't edit an encrypted PDF, but a one-liner Ghostscript command can remove the encryption automatically: https://gist.github.com/compleatang/6046249
Please don't bait for answers with generalisations.
Have you tried Okular for example? It supports filling and saving forms and annotations. You can draw a signature with the freehand annotation. This works great with a touchscreen not so great with a mouse.
It also supports a plethora of useful features and looks and works great out of the box.
It actually CAN insert a signature via its Stamp annotation but unfortunately this doesn't produce an annotation that works outside of okular due to a current limitation in poppler which is why all pdf readers based on it won't have that feature.
Here is the 10 year old bug that nobody is working on that would presumably make it possible for any reader to have this feature.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/issues/522
I think it seems like a major missing feature for you but perhaps hasn't received much attention because if you use it to sign business documents you yourself may use this future a lot whereas 99% of users who are consuming documents or exporting them from word processing documents don't know this feature exists nor need it.
Maybe people ought to put money towards a bounty for someone to implement it?