FRESH
Hacker News
Hacker News Hacker NewsThere'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.
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).
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
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)
Unless BreezePDF is open source, (it is not) it is in violation of MuPDFs AGPL license.
- 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.
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?
