[mrfumier]

But... why? WHY??

Why would I run a docker container, a webserver, start a browser, navigate webpages... just to do some operations on a pdf locally?

A few KiloBytes native program like PDFtk (https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/) does the job perfectly.

I don't understand what is the point of bloating softwares like this. Not even speaking of the very bad consequences for the planet.

[chaps]

"does the job perfectly"

Um. I work with PDFs a LOT and.. nah PDFtk is pretty weak. It doesn't even do OCR!

This looks like a wonderful tool that solves a lot of problems that existing tools don't typically put together. It's an achievement, and your post is unnecessarily crass.

This is very much the sort of tool that you host internally at a newsroom so journalists don't have to wrangle with software or write code. Like, in that situation, who cares if it's on top of docker? The users definitely won't give a shit.

Please consider that you're not the target audience....

[ikurei]

It may not be right for you, but I can see situations where this would be preferable.

If because of your job you find yourself doing these operations very often, and the ability to do them from several devices with different OSes is valuable, it might be great to throw this on a server.

Or if your work has several people, may be not very technical folks, do them often. I’ve worked in a couple of places where this could’ve come in handy.

Also, it includes an API. Also, being open source, if in the future you’re creating a web app that needs some of these features, you could learn from/copy from its code.

I think this is a good contribution to the world.

> I don't understand what is the point of bloating softwares like this. Not even speaking of the very bad consequences for the planet.

I partially share this concern. I wouldn’t deploy this for myself unless I had a very easy way to stop it and start it, but anyway while not in use it it should only be consuming a bit of RAM, and there’s plenty of very efficient hardware suitable for small servers these days.

[ornornor]

A web app makes it cross platform. If you have a homelab, deploy it only once for every client.

And PDFtk doesn’t do annotations afaik which is a huge pain point on Linux (at least for me) because there are no applications that I know of to easily do things that are trivial on OSX like adding text or hand drawn signatures to PDFs. Masterpdf can do it but with a watermark and some limitations.

Maybe it doesn’t suit your particular use case but I wouldn’t say pdftk can replace this project.

[jraph]

Xournal++ was already mentionned, Okular also has annotations and I think adding hand drawn signatures.

Though I welcome (new) work in this area.

[throwaway2037]

Xournal++ is amazing for annotating PDFs. I use it to file taxes where fillable PDFs and e-filing don't work as expected.

[adrenvi]

Firefox now has some simple built-in PDF editing tools. Text and images can be added on top, but existing text can't be modified.

[plugin-baby]

> no applications that I know of to easily do things that are trivial on OSX like adding text or hand drawn signatures to PDFs

Try xournal++

[subtra3t]

I think edge would be perfect for you

[ornornor]

Edge the browser?

[subtra3t]

Yes, its pdf editor is very good.

[throwaway2037]

Woah. Very cool. Is this something specific to Microsoft Edge, or also available in other Chromium variants, including Chrome?

[kristiandupont]

Because it's a simple (for me as the user) and reliable way to get a UI without having to send my personal files to some server somewhere. What's the big deal?

[klysm]

The point of the bloat is that web is by far the easiest way to create a cross platform UI. It’s far from ideal but that’s the world we live in.

[niutech]

No, there are easier and more lightweight ways to create a cross-platform UI than to write HTML/CSS/JS: Tkinter, wxPython, PySide6, MiniGUI, Dear ImGui, Nuklear, React Native.

[dragonwriter]

Having used most of those at lrast trivially. i'd have to say that HTML/CSS/JS abd frameworks on top of that are in par with the easiest of those for nontrivial cross-platform UIs, though the others may have other advantages.

[OrangeMusic]

If it's a question of UI only, Electron would be less bloated than a webserver? Arguably?

[loudambiance]

In a hypothetical organization where you have hundreds of more users needing to perform these tasks. Is it better to push and maintain software on hundreds of computers, or one server, that is probably multiple use to begin with. Containers are far easier than maintaining software across hundreds of devices.

[graymatters]

I’ve seen this sort of reaction quite often from people who are/were used to native (desktop) applications and grew professionally in that paradigm. What happened is that there was a paradigm shift to web programming model, where a server and a browser interact and each has a specific role and a well defined interface to interact. Then to address software compatibility/versioning/configuration/predictability came the paradigm of containerization. Both paradigms are dominant now and that’s how younger programmers grew and still are growing professionally. The overhead the paradigm introduces in terms of used resources is an acceptable and affordable price to use the paradigm but is likely to seem overpriced for people used to earlier paradigms. A 1960s programmer may be appalled that a larger COBOL compiled binary is taking several times more memory than a hand coded Assembly equivalent. Next generation of programmers may be doing everything with tell chatGPT a long story of what they want it to build in terms of code.

Point is - paradigms shift, unacceptable prices become affordable. Generational gaps manifest themselves not just between parents and children.

[ungerik]

Because PDF is a minefield and PDFtk does not solve all problems on all platforms. You'll learn that if you try to process millions of PDFs in the wild that may or may not comply with any of the numerous specs.

[throwaway2037]

> A few KiloBytes native program like PDFtk

Is this binary statically linked? If not, I am sure the Tk libs are huge. Not as big as Chromium/Electron and friends, but large.

[Finnucane]

And for all that this does, it doesn’t seem to touch any accessibility remediation problems.

[zelon88]

lol, you think sending TCP packets of your 25mb PDF to Google, so they can send it back, so you can send it to Google again in an email attachment, so they can send it to another Google server to another Google user, so that user can download it and upload it to Google, so they can print it on an 8.5" x 11" piece of paper is saving the planet?

You just sent how much wattage around the globe 100 times for what? To print the paper you already had on your screen?

You sound like the kind of people who put their very important network documentation on Google Drive, so when your network goes down you have no way to access the information required to bring it back up. I'd rather have one engineer who knows the ins-and-outs of a LAMP stack than 10 who only know how to provision cloud VMs.

[rawling]

How did you get "sending it to Google" from

> A few KiloBytes native program like PDFtk

[hacknews20]

So negative, just unbalanced and so negative.