Creators Frustrated by PDF Tool Limitations

“i am not sure about the collab feature, though publish to web is there (i mean you get the zip and you need to do it manually). the performance is on par with other apps though. [re: Presenting Morrow, an open source, privacy focused, and always free alternative!]”

“Description https://www.pdf xchange.com/product/pdf xchange editor seems to have even more options here is a list of ocr packages : https://www.pdf xchange.com/pdf xchange ocr Ticket details | | | | | | | App | PdfCraft | | Type | Feature Request | | Reported by | Estebandelnorte (Discord username: estebandelnorte) — Discord user ID 1262404096023986241 | | Submitted | 2026 10 19 00:08:16 UTC | | Discord server | ArtCraft ( 1359579021108842617 ) | | Submitted from channel | 1558917176453374102 |”

“Description Opening a new pdf opens it in another window. How can we make it that it opens in the same window automatically? I see that one can click on open and then go from there and then it does open in the same window but from workflow point of view that is not straight forward. Ticket details | | | | | | | App | PdfCraft | | Type | Feature Request | | Reported by | O.Anwar (Discord username: profusion235) — Discord user ID 1511369208414474373 | | Submitted | 2026 10 18 16:21:41 UTC | | Disc”

“yeah that change hit me too, super annoying when you working with multiple docs middle click or ctrl+click on the pdf should open in new tab still, if your mouse supports it [re: Uploaded PDF file in Notion is not automatically open in new tab anymore?]”

“ohh that structure tab is a smart move, honestly. having a clean view to compare versions is the whole point, so if that works you're already ahead of the raw .tex diff pain. [re: looking for a few devs to break my open-source CV tools]”

“The new ebook viewer is great, but there are some limitations with PDF as there are no options/settings on the pdf viewer as there are on other file formats such as ePub. There is no option to adjust any settings for a pdf. Please allow ability to show pdf side by side (2 options, side by side aka page 1/2, page 3/4, as well as a title and side by side so page 1 is title, then 2/3 side by side, page 4/5 side by side etc). I have a fair amount of kids books I scanned to make it easier to travel w”

“haha yeah raw LaTeX diffs can get messy that's actually why i added a Structure tab in vita-tree. it shows the CV content without all the LaTeX commands and syntax, more like the actual PDF structure. you can compare versions there without dealing with all that noise. Git branches handle the versioning, but you're not forced to compare raw .tex files. the YAML/JSON approach is a good point tho, especially for separating content from formatting. might explore that too 👀 appreciate the fe”

“I stopped taking client photos two years back. Onboarding says native PDF or read-only access, nothing else. First holdout sent a clean export in two minutes once I held the line. [re: What's the worst format a client has ever sent you their bank statements in?]”

“Batch print all open PDF documents Split a PDF page into 2 or 4 sections and create new individual pages from them (to extract multiple labels onto single pages)”

“When using PhotoCraft in a browser (e.g., self hosted via Docker), basic OS level interactions require several manual export/import steps: Printing requires disk roundtrips: There is currently no option to print directly from the app. To print a design, I have to export/download the image to my computer, locate the file in my OS file explorer, open an external image viewer, and trigger the print dialog from there. No native clipboard interoperability: I cannot copy images directly out of PhotoCr”

“Hello, Is it possible to add the ability to import and create .pdf files from .html?”

“Description Right now, PdfCraft is moving at absolute warp speed (hundreds of commits and PRs landing daily). However, for users running portable builds, the current manual update process is not only tedious, it frequently causes file lock panics and config crashes : Current Bug: Extracting a new portable zip over an active folder while pdfcraft.exe is running triggers unhandled Windows file lock errors ( Access is denied / Os { code: 5 } ), occasionally wiping local app state or causing a hard”

“Description Please add an Export option inside Organize Pages. Ticket details | | | | | | | App | PdfCraft | | Type | Feature Request | | Reported by | Abhishek (Discord username: abhishekravi 995) — Discord user ID 1560573996804608040 | | Submitted | 2026 10 18 04:19:59 UTC | | Discord server | ArtCraft ( 1359579021108842617 ) | | Submitted from channel | 1558917176453374102 | | Submission ID | TR YKVAG7ESDM | <sub Submitted through Discord by Abhishek and created by the Ticket Relay integratio”

“Description Edit A PDF Add Crop Option Like Page Originize The Edit a PDF tool has an Organize Pages option, but it does not have a Crop option. Please add the Crop option to the Edit a PDF tool as well. Ticket details | | | | | | | App | PdfCraft | | Type | Feature Request | | Reported by | Abhishek (Discord username: abhishekravi 995) — Discord user ID 1560573996804608040 | | Submitted | 2026 10 18 04:17:05 UTC | | Discord server | ArtCraft ( 1359579021108842617 ) | | Submitted from channel |”

“I'm researching whether a small tool is worth building for people who publish ebooks on Kindle Direct Publishing, and I'm looking for a few beta testers who actually upload books to KDP — authors or formatters. The prototype is a single web page that checks an EPUB file (and, separately, a marketing cover image) against a short list of KDP upload criteria. It runs entirely in your browser — your file is never uploaded anywhere — and it deliberately does not do full EPUB validation. Nothi”

submitted by /u/naeem288 [link] [comments]

“I've noticed a lot of these vibe coded pdf editors popping up of late. As a tech person not a business person, what does this do that a Google docs/word save as pdf doesn't do ? [re: [Showoff Saturday] Built editpdf.ink – A lightweight, in-browser PDF editing tool]”

“client side pdf processing is a solid approach for privacy and speed. i would be curious how it handles large files and complex annotations on mobile. [re: [Showoff Saturday] Built editpdf.ink – A lightweight, in-browser PDF editing tool]”

“Hi! First of all, thank you for developing DesignCraft! I'm really excited about this project and would love to use it for Thai language documents.(I'm a writer and this is very promising free tools to use to make e book file.) I've noticed that some Thai fonts already work in DesignCraft, which is great! However, there seems to be an issue with automatic line wrapping. The problem Unlike English, Thai generally doesn't use spaces to separate individual words. Instead, proper line wrapping requi”

“Most "free online PDF tools" make you upload your contract, bank statement or ID to their server. I wanted to see if that step was still necessary in 2026. Turns out it mostly isn't. InstantTools (instanttools.org) runs PDF merge/split/compress/redact, video trimming and conversion, OCR, image compression, EXIF removal and a bunch of dev utilities entirely client-side, using pdf-lib, qpdf, ffmpeg.wasm and Tesseract.js compiled to WebAssembly. What I learned building it: - ffmpeg.wa”

“Open isn't quite enough either. PDF is an ISO standard with a public spec, the file sits right there on your disk, and getting your own words back out of it is still miserable. Unless whoever made it bothered to tag it, the text is just glyphs placed at coordinates. No paragraphs, no reading order, sometimes not even spaces between words. Two-column pages come out interleaved, and a scanned PDF is only pictures of text. So I'd add a third test after "can I reach the file" and &”

“It's a pretty old idea. The formats were just not always (so) human readable, like Open Office XML. As long as the specifications exist, there will be no problem making a new app for editing/reading/governance. Reverse engineering an undocumented plain text file format is totally possible, but some knowledge is handy (especially since the YAML part often is not standardised). The clue is to document and standardise the format, INCLUDING the semantics (which many JSON users don't care abo”

“Description Will there be a function "search and replace" in the near future? This would be great! Ticket details | | | | | | | App | PdfCraft | | Type | Feature Request | | Reported by | sHoCkWaVe (Discord username: shockwave6759) — Discord user ID 428899999951093770 | | Submitted | 2026 10 16 19:54:12 UTC | | Discord server | ArtCraft ( 1359579021108842617 ) | | Submitted from channel | 1558917176453374102 | | Submission ID | TR 2NGZE8D61B | <sub Submitted through Discord by sHoCkWaVe and crea”

“KeyPDF.net can edit existing text, redact and annotate and I have been making it from scratch for over a year. I believe it is much easier to simply type keypdf.net in the browser search on any device and do what you could've done in heavy desktop apps. KeyPDF works faster than most of the PDF apps thanks to its own PDF engine and also works locally on your device. I really need feedback from you guys, thanks. submitted by /u/Decent-Blacksmith761 [link] [comments]”

“I'm encountering an increasing number of clients sending *.pages files. I use Windows for my practice and am an Android user for my phone, so neither natively handles the .pages format. Most clients don't seem to even understand the file format they've sent. I assume it's just something iPhones are generating and using these days. What's the best app to convert the *.pages file into its "real" or original format, whether that's docx, pdf, etc.? I've Googled”

“Description There's a feature in Adobe that lets you combine files and convert them to PDF directly from the Windows context menu. It makes a huge difference for anyone handling high volumes of documents throughout the day." Ticket details | | | | | | | App | PdfCraft | | Type | Feature Request | | Reported by | IndianoCarioca (Discord username: indianocarioca) — Discord user ID 248987873527857152 | | Submitted | 2026 10 16 16:05:22 UTC | | Discord server | ArtCraft ( 1359579021108842617 ) | | S”

“<img width="4876" height="1691" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user attachments/assets/1123c05b e4e3 42af 812e af800dca5e86" / Summary PhotoCraft has no equivalent of Photoshop's File Automate PDF Presentation . It lets you combine several images/documents into a single standard PDF, either as a multi page document or as a full screen slideshow, directly from the app. Current behavior The File Automate menu has no option for exporting multiple files into one multi page PDF. Expected behavio”

submitted by /u/pop6996pop [link] [comments]

“You can make a full offline documentation viewer using just HTML and CSS, like Dash or Zeal do by bundling static files. If you want searchable content, you need to pre-generate a simple JavaScript index since HTML and CSS alone can't search text. [re: Offline uses for HTML (+ CSS)?]”

So I am very happy to have found Stirling PDF on here! Amazing. The interface needs work - maybe filtering based on the keyword, I had to search twice for things in…

“Description Hi, there. Please add 4" x 6" label option. Thank you so much. Ticket details | | | | | | | App | PdfCraft | | Type | Feature Request | | Reported by | Keith (Discord username: keith kev) — Discord user ID 791943706995458049 | | Submitted | 2026 10 16 03:44:37 UTC | | Discord server | ArtCraft ( 1359579021108842617 ) | | Submitted from channel | 1558917176453374102 | | Submission ID | TR 8JVDNPRHD7 | <sub Submitted through Discord by Keith and created by the Ticket Relay integration”

“Not keeping it secret — the parsing isn't really the moat. Scanned statements go through Tesseract OCR running locally (that was the hardest part to get reliable — the build pipeline runs an OCR self-test on a scanned sample before any release). Digital PDFs are standard text extraction. The part I'd actually call the product is the verification layer on top: bank statements print a running balance after every transaction, so each extracted row gets checked against the statement's ow”

“One thing that helped on my small VPS was pausing Paperless OCR while Immich worked through its first backlog. The two jobs compete for the same RAM and CPU and Paperless can quietly spike while you are watching Immich. I set PAPERLESS_TASK_WORKERS to 1 and let Immich finish its import first, then turned Paperless back up. [re: My 4 GB VPS fell over the day I added Immich, I want to know how much RAM does your stack really use?]”

“Could you show a sample signed PDF being checked in Adobe Reader, without easysign? Your docs say that's possible, and I'd want to see what still works if the service closes. [re: Tackling security and privacy trust issues]”

“Dear Artcraft team, I love this project, it kicks ass! I want to propose a more elaborate booklet printing functionality. Right now it's possible to export pdf's that do imposition in the same way as InDesign's '2 Up Saddle Stitch' but there is no way to do more advanced imposition schemes, like Perfect Bound for example. I work at a university for the arts where every day I see a ton of design students that print full books on laserprinters. It would greatly improve DesignCraft's usefulness for”

“Description Good morning, when I try to edit a PDF, it doesn't find the correct fonts needed to edit the text. Ticket details | | | | | | | App | PdfCraft | | Type | Feature Request | | Reported by | PeeP (Discord username: peep7631) — Discord user ID 250373614396768256 | | Submitted | 2026 10 15 08:17:51 UTC | | Discord server | ArtCraft ( 1359579021108842617 ) | | Submitted from channel | 1558917176453374102 | | Submission ID | TR Y216EJWVMY | <sub Submitted through Discord by PeeP and created”

“Description Hello, Im trying to export my stuff to PDF but I cant find a possible way to do it Ticket details | | | | | | | App | PhotoCraft | | Type | Feature Request | | Reported by | Yes (Discord username: chesta0203) — Discord user ID 530035213485604874 | | Submitted | 2026 10 15 08:04:47 UTC | | Discord server | ArtCraft ( 1359579021108842617 ) | | Submitted from channel | 1558917176453374102 | | Submission ID | TR 7RE4849Y3X | <sub Submitted through Discord by Yes and created by the Ticket”

“i like the photo upload idea, guessing it pulls the text and you just tap the words you want to save? how does it handle weird fonts or dense pages [re: [Beta] Built a vocabulary app for readers. Let's help each other out!]”

submitted by /u/VeeerSukhadiyaBooks [link] [comments]

“Description When using the OCR, it scanned a document and was able to find all the words, but it didn't string them together into one paragraph when I tried to copy and paste them into something else, It was like each word was it's own object, not a continuous paragraph. Operating system and version Kubuntu Ticket details | | | | | | | App | PdfCraft | | Type | Bug Report | | Reported by | Pistolay (Discord username: pistolay8862) — Discord user ID 174988764349726723 | | Submitted | 2026 10 14 2”

“Fair ask. That run was 20 files, 314 MB (long PDFs, scans and photos), about 350,000 words of text split into 3,612 passages to embed. With an NVIDIA GPU (an RTX 3060) the whole first index takes 67 s. The 18 minutes was the worst case, an 8-core CPU with no graphics card: embedding took 1,074 s with the original model and 258 s with the int8 ONNX export of the same model (3.4 vs 14.0 passages a second), and the whole index went from 1,112 s to 296 s. Search works from the first seconds either w”

“love that it keeps signatures vector, nothing worse than a crisp doc turning to pixel soup at 200% [re: Proview — An open-source PDF and image viewer with markup, handwritten signatures and OCR]”

“Hello ArtCraft team! First of all, thank you for your work on ArtCraft and your commitment to building open source creative software. It’s great to see projects like PhotoCraft, FilmCraft, and LightCraft being developed as alternatives to proprietary applications. I’d like to ask whether you have plans to expand the ArtCraft ecosystem beyond Adobe alternatives and develop a powerful PDF editor and OCR application for macOS and Linux. There are two applications I’d particularly like to see open s”

“I had an ancient scanned PDF with a single typo in it. The original document is thousands of miles away. I tried many of those online PDF tools and even asked ChatGPT to fix it. But the result never really looked correct. And some of the "free" PDF editors that I tried wanted me to pay just to download the edited file. Which was annoying. So, as an engineer man, I looked myself in the mirror and asked myself whether I am going to let one PDF file beat me. And I said 'maybe', bu”

“This would be especially useful for users who only need to print a specific section of a drawing or PDF document instead of the entire page.”

“Use my scanner to create a pdf in adobe acrobat pro. Would repalce the application if PDFCraft did this too”

“Like many of you, I've had to use tools like CloudConvert, 123apps, or Smallpdf to quickly grab an MP3 from an MP4, compress an image, or merge two PDFs. What always bothered me was the standard SaaS converter playbook: You upload your confidential files to their remote cloud servers. They make you wait in an artificial server queue. They hit you with a "100MB limit," "2 free conversions per day," or a $12/month paywall because their AWS server bandwidth costs are high. M”

“Sometimes I feel the need to group together a bunch of documents in PNGX but there doesn't seem to be any good way to do it. Yes, this is different from tags, correspondents or document types, which I already use for other purposes. How I'd like it to work: I would be browsing documents and see one or several that should be in the same group together. Call it group, topic, category, whatever. I'd like to be able to select them, choose the group from a dropdown, and assign them to it.”

“Hey man, Good work honestly. I've download it and use it for a while. Have few suggestions - When reading a pdf the bottom bar stay visible, kinda distracting - When open a pdf it says "Rendering page" and takes a little time. It's okay for the first time load but happening every time kinda annoying. - If I use dark toggle in pdf then click on a page, it becomes white again. - Trackpad pinch to zoom would be great. [re: I got tired of 500 MB ebook readers, so I built one in Rus”

“Thanks! Short answer: Inspect Element won't help here, sadly. The PDF isn't made from the page's CSS, it's drawn separately in your browser, so overrides only change the preview, not the file. Closest today: Chat bubbles + the "Plain" theme gives a white page, but your own bubbles stay light green and the date pills are light gray. "Document" layout has no bubbles at all, though author names are colored. An outline-only print theme is a fair ask. Two quick que”

“请求：提供可选的付费无水印导出 使用 HyphenScreen 制作并导出教程视频后，在外部播放器中看到右下角的「黑粉科技」品牌标识。README 已说明从 1.4.0 起，MP4/GIF 导出包含不可关闭的标识，预览中不显示。 我尊重作者在免费导出中保留品牌标识的决定，也理解这有助于推广软件、支持持续开发。这个请求不是要求免费去掉标识，而是希望有一个 可选的付费升级或许可证，让用户可以导出无水印视频 。 学校、机构或工作场景的教程往往需要对外分享，成片里的第三方品牌标识会影响使用。对于这些用途，我愿意为正式的无水印导出选项付费；具体价格和一次性许可证/订阅方式由作者决定。 建议的体验： 免费版本继续保留现有品牌标识。 提供付费无水印导出选项，适用于 MP4（如可行，也包括 GIF）。 在导出面板明确提示免费成片会添加标识，并提供升级入口；目前仅看预览不容易发现成片会带标识。 已购买用户可以选择是否保留品牌标识。 目前是否已有这样的付费方案，或有计划提供？谢谢开发这个实用的工具。”

“Hello everyone! Since a large part of what I learn and add to my vault ultimately comes from books or articles, I’ve included a reader in my ZettelFlow plugin; I wanted to compete with the major readers on the market by offering practically everything (except OCR, for instance, due to the impact it would have on the plugin's code size). With this update of ZettelFLow, I’ve included a reader for ePubs, PDFs, articles saved via the web clipper, and Markdown files—featuring highlighting capabil”

“Any reason why there seems to be no pdf viewer (shouldn't that be part of the browser, I guess no one has to build one themselfs)? Both for the overview (like a pdf thumbnail that paperless shows) and even more important for checking the files - feels weird to open the pdf in a new tab just to check the tags (side by side view?). [re: Lemmary — a self-hosted document archive (paperless alternative). October update]”

“After much research into Flying Saucer(Salesforce's native pdf engine) I could not understand why custom fonts weren't able to be rendered. The engine allows for them, they are supported, why would Salesforce intentionally nerf the fonts? While I know per their documentation in Salesforce https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/platform/salesforce-pages-developers-guide/guide/pages-output-pdf-supported-fonts.html Web fonts aren’t supported when the page is rendered as a PDF file. I also sa”

“This is clean, I like how it doesn't bombard you with ads right away. Most free PDF tools feel like you're navigating through a minefield of popups just to rotate one page. The compression tool is what I would use most, sometimes school sends me these massive scanned documents and my inbox cries. One thing that would make me trust it more is if you put somewhere very obvious that files get deleted from server after processing, not buried in small text at bottom. [re: I built a free onlin”

“made lemma while working through a stats textbook, mostly bc i kept losing my place flipping back to "see (3.41)" and "by theorem 2.3". it reads the pdf once, on your mac, and turns references into links: hover to preview the equation or theorem, click to peek at it next to the line you're on, and back takes you where you were. citations open their bibliography entry. proofs can be folded so you try them yourself first, and there's a derivation checker that tests each”

“For thousands of pages I wouldn't ask an AI to rewrite them one by one. It's slow and it costs a lot. There are free tools for that. Back up everything and keep the originals untouched. Convert the old pages to plain text files (Markdown) with pandoc. It's a free converter that reads HTML and Word (you will experience problems in this step, when you pass this, the rest are easy!) Use a static site generator (Hugo or Eleventy, VitePress) to put every story into one modern, mobile-frie”

“Thanks, this is exactly the kind of report I was hoping for. A blank screen on nested chapter headings is a bug on my side, not your file's fault. If that epub is something public domain, or you remember roughly how the headings nest (parts that contain chapters, or chapters inside chapters), tell me the title or the structure here and I'll try to reproduce it. Glad the branch picker reads clearly, that was the part I was most nervous about. [re: [Android + iOS, Live] Foreverse: a reader”

“I think this can be done without relying too much on AI. Extract the existing HTML files from your server Let Claude/Codex to create a script that converts those files into markdown Use something like Astro or Eleventy Add a simple CMS so you can manage stories without coding. The tricky part is cleaning up the old HTML and preserving existing links. Important: DO NOT let the AI scan all the HTML files. Just ask it to create a script/code that converts HTML to markdown. It should give you some J”