Show HN: BreezePDF – Free, in-browser PDF editor

[philjohnson]

BreezePDF lets you edit, sign, merge, compress, redact, OCR, fill forms, extract tables, and use 30+ more PDF tools — all in the browser, no sign-up. Files never leave your computer.

I built it because when people search Google for common PDF tasks, many of the tools they find upload documents to a server. I wanted an option that keeps files local instead.

I posted an earlier version on HN last spring: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43880962

At the time it only supported a small set of features. Over the last 10 months I rebuilt large parts of it and expanded it to nearly 40 tools, including several ideas that came from comments in that earlier thread.

There is also now a desktop app for macOS, Windows, and Linux, plus a CLI/SDK for developers.

[colesantiago]

Note that this "free" PDF editor uses MuPDF under the hood which uses an AGPL license with the desktop version is being commercial.

Unless BreezePDF is open source, (it is not) it is in violation of MuPDFs AGPL license.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47556806

https://artifex.com/licensing

[kevlened]

For those looking for an MIT alternative, there's an embeddable solution which uses PDFium (Apache) compiled to wasm instead of MuPDF (AGPL): https://www.embedpdf.com/

There'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.

[eahm]

I don't want to hijack the thread but isn't BentoPDF open source and does all that and more for free? https://www.bentopdf.com

[philjohnson]

First thing is it was released much after BreezePDF was.

You could make the same argument with Adobe or any other PDF software. Why doesn't everyone use all use BentoPDF? Things like brand, and simply what shows up when they search on Google are factors.

Also, Bento doesn't have a desktop app a regular person can download. You have to download the GitHub. Non-developers won't do that.

Additionally, each tool is separate. It's not all in one editor. That's a UX consideration. BreezePDF, everything is in one editor interface. It added a lot of development complexity but makes the UX better in my opinion.

I tried Bento and some of their tools are very slow, cause of large downloads to the client. BreezePDF is much faster.

Good for them making an open source tool though. Lots of options out there and everyone can choose for themselves.

[pshirshov]

> Lots of options out there and everyone can choose for themselves.

You are shilling your stuff at a wrong place, I think. Better apply to YC or, I dunno, go public. Also add some nice catch phrases (e.g. "Blazing Fast", "Production Ready") and emojis here and there.

[philjohnson]

Show HN is show your product. That's what I'm doing. It's not an open source forum. The only shilling is mentioning other products on someone else's post...

[pshirshov]

> 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

[pshirshov]

Well, all the agents, including free and even local ones could do this for less money and without AGPL violations.

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

[AlexeyBelov]

I like how he doesn't acknowledge AGPL violation at all..

[efilife]

I personally hate it

[Lockal]

1) Not free, also violates AGPL license

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).

[fn-mote]

Notice the IMO poor behavior of the author on the previous thread. [1] Search for 'philjohnson'. This post removes the contentious word "free" but still does not convey that no sign-up is required but you are apparently limited to 3 files without signup. Reading the previous thread was a turn-off enough for me to warn you.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47555636

[philjohnson]

Free is still in this post. It's free to use, you can use the editor as much as you want with 40+ tools. Just a limit of 3 exports.

[gwerbret]

You've had enough arguments with people in both this thread and the previous that I'm pretty sure you understand what the issue is with your use of the word "free".

What you are offering is NOT a free tool -- it is a demo, for a tool for which you are charging $12/month. No reasonable person would interpret a grand total of 3 exports as enough to justify calling this a "free" tool.

This is to say nothing of your violation of AGPL on the use of MuPDF, which has been pointed out here and elsewhere.

But of course, you're free to Show HN a paid product; just kindly don't insult our collective intelligences in the process.

[bavell]

> What you are offering is NOT a free tool -- it is a demo, for a tool for which you are charging $12/month

Commonly known as a "free trial"

[philjohnson]

Nope. 3 free per month. You'd know that if you tried it. Commonly known as a "free plan"

[tomalbrc]

- 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

[i000]

Imagine a pizza place that allows you to pick from 40+ toppings but you can only order a margherita ;) /s

[philjohnson]

Bad analogy

Imagine a pizza place where you can try three slices for free before you order one?

Or that you can make a pizza at the shop, add and remove topping as you wish until you're satisfied?

[atoav]

Also a bad analogy. A slize of pizza has no onboarding cost for the user. You eat it and that is it. A PDF editor requires you to understand how to use it.

A better comparison would be a pizza shop at the end of a long hike that advertised itself online to offer infinite amount of free pizza. So you go on the hike and then it turns out you only get one slice and have to pay a fortune for the rest. You planned to get free food st the end of the hike, but it turns out the food you eventually will have to eat is not free and not even cheap.

This is not free, it is s free trial.

[k310]

This may be outside your plan, but I really could use a pdf editor that makes Internet Archive book scans more readable.

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)

[0] https://i.ibb.co/67zpBDgh/OIP-2472099845.jpg

[fn-mote]

Sounds like a job for ScanTailor. I'm not aware of an actively developed alternative. The version on my system comes from ScanTailor Advanced [3].

[1]: https://scantailor.org/ [2]: https://github.com/scantailor/scantailor [3]: https://github.com/4lex4/scantailor-advanced

[philjohnson]

Neat idea. Basically an "Enhance Readability" button. I'm looking into how it can be done, will report back.

[momo_dev]

If you ever need a backend for storing the edited PDFs, FilePost (https://filepost.dev) could handle that. One API call to upload and you get a permanent CDN URL back. Could be a good complement for a "save and share" feature.

[mmooss]

Great idea, though I haven't had a chance to use it much (yet). I especially appreciate the end-user control of the documents - that they never leave the user's computer. A question for any newish PDF application developer:

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?

[philjohnson]

Thanks! Feel free to send feedback to [e-mail] if you get the chance to try it.

Regarding your concern, if a manipulation of the PDF doesn't meet the standard specification, it won't render properly in a PDF viewer as it is in the present day, let alone in 20 years. All PDF viewers/editors worth their salt adhere to the PDF spec. So as long as the PDF specification stays the same, anything that renders correctly now in a PDF viewer will render correctly in the future.

For something like compression, if the file reduces in size and the PDF renders the same (minus expected potential minor quality loss), then you have evidence right there that it worked successfully.

I built BreezePDF with PDF spec adhering libraries, so everything should be up to standards.

Let me know if that answers your question!

[vldszn]

My two cents: I’m building a free, open-source invoice PDF generator. Check it out.

App: https://easyinvoicepdf.com

GitHub: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf

[classicpsy]

I tried it. Looks great. Just few refinements from my side.

- 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.

[philjohnson]

Thanks for trying it!

In what scenario was undo not working? If you can provide that context, I can dig into it more as to what wasn't undoing properly.

For text editing, I see the issue with that for some of the fonts. Fixing now

Sorry for the trouble!

[philjohnson]

Font change for text editing is fixed now

[arrsingh]

Love it! Bookmarked for the next time I need to sign a PDF and then will pony up the $$.

[philjohnson]

Awesome! Would love to get your feedback once you try it.

[arrsingh]

anytime. Feel free to email me and remind - email in profile.

[intoXbox]

Nice tool. I like the local approach. I think a nice feature would be to remove all PII from documents, so that users can redact PDFs and upload to their favourite LLM.

[philjohnson]

Good suggestion! I'll look into implementing that.

[philjohnson]

I made a first version of it if you want to check it out! It's under the "markup" tab

[evaneykelen]

Is this a viable alternative to the Adobe PDF app on Windows? I'm looking for an alternative for our company to replace Adobe's bloatware.

[philjohnson]

Yes, it definitely is. It handles everything from the basics like editing, signing, and merging to more advanced stuff like OCR, redaction, and digital certificates all in a clean and lightweight interface.

The desktop app is only 58mb and uses effectively zero CPU, so it's about as far from bloatware as you can get.

Shoot me an email at [e-mail] — happy to jump on a call and walk you through it before you get it for your company.

[nosrepa]

I've been using pdfgear to some success.

[opem]

Is it a one shot AI generated site?

[philjohnson]

Far from it haha

Some features took a longggg time to do, such as table extraction, text editing, and (surprisingly) preserving positioning of elements (text, images etc.) when rotating the page in the downloaded file - PDF specification has a different orientation system than the web, so this was very intricate to get correct.

A lot of PDF editors have tools that all work independently, meaning you have to use each tool separately. My decision to add all the features I did while keeping it in one editor was because I felt that was a better user experience, but I means that all features become intertwined, which added a ton of complexity managing that.

[JaredCampbell]

keep it up.

[philjohnson]

Thank you!

[npilk]

Some discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47555636

[philjohnson]

Yes, yesterday's post got marked as duplicate because I didn't reference the previous post from last year. I got permission from the HN moderator tomhow to repost it again with the reference to last year's post.