Show HN: BreezePDF – Free, in-browser PDF editor
breezepdf.comBreezePDF 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.
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.
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
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.
Is it a one shot AI generated site?
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
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
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
Neat idea. Basically an "Enhance Readability" button. I'm looking into how it can be done, will report back.
Love it! Bookmarked for the next time I need to sign a PDF and then will pony up the $$.
Awesome! Would love to get your feedback once you try it.
anytime. Feel free to email me and remind - email in profile.
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.
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 joe@breezepdf.com — happy to jump on a call and walk you through it before you get it for your company.
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.
Good suggestion! I'll look into implementing that.
I made a first version of it if you want to check it out! It's under the "markup" tab
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?
Thanks! Feel free to send feedback to joe@breezepdf.com 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!
Some discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47555636
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.