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Comment by vunderba | Hacker News Reader

Seems like Clientside PDF editors are the new "hello world" app these days. From the last couple months on Show HN alone:

Show HN: PDF Quick – Free PDF tools with 100% client-side processing

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46094734

Show HN: A privacy-first, client-side toolbox (PDF, Imgs, Dev) no server uploads

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46018221

Show HN: FileZen – Client-side PDF and Video tools using WebAssembly

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46339833

Show HN: JW Tool Box – Free, privacy-first web tools (PDF, Image, Converters)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46065448

Show HN: PDFClear – Browser-based PDF tools with local AI (WASM+Transformers.js)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46036944

Show HN: Free PDF tools that run in the browser

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315672

Show HN: Client-side file tools – PDF, images, crypto, all in-browser

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209627

View on HN

Due to pdf popularity there is a lot of demand for pdf processing tools. And the format is so complex that there are many nontrivial and creative ways to do pdf processing. That's why these "Hello World" projects usually make Top 5 on HN, and one of the upvotes is usually from me.

>many nontrivial and creative ways to do pdf processing

They're all wrapping PDFlib and provide the same functionality.

I am already well served by ghostscript, GIMP, Imagemagick, etc:

Optimize PDF:

    #!/bin/bash
    INPUT="$1"
    OUTPUT="$(mktemp --suffix=.pdf)"
    gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \
    -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile="$OUTPUT" "$INPUT"
    mv "$OUTPUT" "$INPUT"

Merge PDF:

    #!/bin/sh
    gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
      -dCompatibilityLevel=1.3 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \
      -sOutputFile=merged.pdf "$@"

And so on and so forth.

Moreover, I see a webapp and I immediately assume everything I do in this app is exfiltrated and abused.

I can check that the webapp advertised above is indeed local-first, but I can't be 100% sure they don't steal my data in a way I did not foresee, e.g. via websockets or cookies.

Because I learnt this the hard way by being on Instagram and Gmail.

Your commands to process PDF with Ghostscript are lossy (they lose lots of metadata and in minor ways they also change how the PDF renders), and they produce very large PDF files.

Can you expand on why the produced PDF files are supposed to be larger than the originals? I've not observed that yet.

You're being downvoted because not everyone has CLI access to a server and the required ghostscript binaries etc.

Realistically, most 'normal users' have PDF needs like these links and we as tech people can safely give these sites to non-technical people and have confidence their data isn't being stolen on remote dodgy servers (think gas / electricity bills, invoices, bank statements etc which is a PII gold pot).

Server? what server? Ghostscript is available in virtually any Linux distro, on Mac with and without brew and even on Windows.

I have no confidence in any website, especially the one that claims to be local-only but can technically change on a whim of the developer once it starts getting enough traffic from users.

OTOH, I trust 30+ years old software sitting on on my hard drive not to phone home on every keystroke.

To better compress my personal preference is

    pdftops -paper A4 -expand -level3 file.pdf # I'm from EU, so A4 is my common paper format

    ps2pdf14 -dEmbedAllFonts=true        \
    -dUseFlateCompression=true           \
    -dOptimize=true                      \
    -dProcessColorModel=/DeviceRGB       \
    -r72                                 \
    -dDownsampleGrayImages=true          \
    -dGrayImageResolution=150            \
    -dAutoFilterGrayImages=false         \
    -dGrayImageDownsampleType=/Bicubic   \
    -dDownsampleMonoImages=true          \
    -dMonoImageResolution=150            \
    -dMonoImageDownsampleType=/Subsample \
    -dDownsampleColorImages=true         \
    -dColorImageResolution=150           \
    -dAutoFilterColorImages=false        \
    -dColorImageDownsampleType=/Bicubic  \
    -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook                 \
    -dNOSAFER                            \
    -dALLOWPSTRANSPARENCY                \
    -dShowAnnots=false                   \
      file.ps compressed.pdf

If you do `-dEmbedAllFonts=true` then probably `-dSubsetFonts=true` would also be useful.

And for the rest, `-dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook` should already have most of the values that you set explicitely.

During my college days, I used iLovePDF a lot, so I wanted to build an alternative to it. It’s not just about PDFs - I also have work in progress around image processing and related tools and Chrome Extetion as well

Sure, but if you just wanted a 100% client-side PDF tool, there are dozens of them in existence already.

You can do as you like, but I don't think this is a particularly good use of your time, even with AI doing the majority of the heavy lifting.

I guess what I'm saying is that "Swiss army knife multitool" apps are one of the lowest hanging LLM fruits, so don't be too surprised when you find that the tree has been stripped clean.

Half of them also have a very obviously vibecoded front-end that looks exactly the same

They’re created to offer functional outcomes. If they’re doing so in a friendly interface then I’m cool with that

Sure, if they're tested well enough that there are no obvious UX issues (which is usually not the case)

It's just that there's zero effort put into them so they don't really offer anything of value. If you write a todo list-tier app, it would be completely useless to most people, but it's a learning project for you. If you vibecoded a todo list-tier app, it's completely useless to most people including yourself.

So if a platform is vibe-coded, it suddenly has no value? When the Spotify founder vibe-codes an app, it’s praised—but when an open-source contributor like me does it, it’s seen as a bad thing? That doesn’t seem fair

Where is the source then?

change my mind after the tailwind thing happened not going to open source it for now.

So why is it relevant for 'pdfwithlove' that you are an open source contributor?

> When the Spotify founder vibe-codes an app, it’s praised

Not sure which app you're talking about

https://x.com/tobi/status/2010438500609663110?s=20

Shopify CEO

He vibecoded a web viewer for an open file format as a one time project for personal use. It's not even a public project. Not sure how it's relevant.

That being said, Shopify CEO has the worst AI takes ever so he's probably the last person you should take as your role model.

I don’t have a role model, bro, and I don’t need to justify anything to you. You’re not that important-so yeah, go ahead and make some contribution to the world, not here

/r/selfhosted just added a new rule, vibe coded apps only on Friday because there were just too many.

You're right, the market is flooded with simple "button grid" apps. That saturation is actually why I built FlowPDF.

I didn't want another list of basic tools; I wanted to chain them. I built a node-based editor so you can create actual pipelines (Merge -> OCR -> Filter -> Compress) rather than just doing one-off tasks.

I think that's the only way to actually add value over the 50 other "Hello World" clones.

https://www.flowpdf.app/ if you wanna check it out!

Not even couple of months. Just within last month.

All with similar design, similar implementation, similar HN post. Literally AI slop.

Also:

Show HN: BentoPDF is a privacy first PDF Toolkit

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46657892 (this one just yesterday)

Show HN: NoUploadTools – Free Tools that don't upload your files

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46516400

Show HN: TechRex – client-side PDF editor (no upload, no watermark)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45611498

Also, PdfTk has existed for decades and is very solid (but Windows only, I think).

Good point! I don't understand why this link received so many points.

https://incentius.com/

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