from Hacker News

Stirling PDF: Self-hosted, web-based PDF manipulation tool

by gitinit on 5/2/24, 11:56 PM with 103 comments

• by noodlesUK on 5/3/24, 3:06 PM

  One thing I think is really lacking from the PDF ecosystem is good open-source tools around signing. PDF signatures are something that is legally important in a lot of the world with regulations like eIDAS. Unfortunately it's extremely difficult to cryptographically sign PDF documents with tools other than Adobe's and some other (often more sketchy) proprietary tools. Even if you figure out how to use stuff like LibreOffice or poppler to sign, you'll struggle to obtain certs that will validate without spending an arm and a leg.

  I really hope that someone will decide to step in and become the Let's Encrypt of PDF and S/MIME certs, because that will improve public trust significantly.

• by maweki on 5/3/24, 7:23 AM

  I host this at home. I don't use it myself, I can use the linux CLI tools that its based on. But I prefer my wife to use this to convert/split/etc. her pdf files this way instead of using some random website or app (that uses the same cli tool anyway).

  She doesn't mind either way. Seems to work well enough for her use cases.

• by anotherhue on 5/3/24, 3:53 AM

  > Originally developed entirely by ChatGPT, this locally hosted web application has evolved to encompass a comprehensive set of features, addressing all your PDF requirements.

  Well that's that then.

• by petepete on 5/3/24, 7:22 AM

  I'd love it if this could be integrated into Paperless. Every now and then one of my scanned documents goes in upside down and I need to rescan. Clicking rotate, maybe reordering and letting it be rescanned would be great.

• by tacocataco on 5/3/24, 3:18 PM

  One of firefox's more recent updates added a PDF editor.

  I think people's perception of forefox is from several versons ago. As a daily user throughout its history, Firefox has made alot of progress over the years IMO.

  Give it another shot if it's been a while.

• by emarsden on 5/3/24, 6:07 AM

  From the README: “Stirling PDF does not initiate any outbound calls for record-keeping or tracking purposes”. Beyond auditing the code, how could a potential user verify this claim in advance, and how can a web-based app help support such a claim (in particular when the app does need to make some web requests to operate, but only to a restricted list of URLs that might be listed in a manifest along the lines of a Content-Security-Policy for instance)?

  This is a concrete problem when deploying apps that need the user to “upload” some sensitive content.

• by mstijak on 5/3/24, 6:34 AM

  Working on a product that could be similarily described.

  CxReports: Self-hosted, web-based PDF reporting tool.

  https://www.cx-reports.com

• by llagerlof on 5/3/24, 5:11 AM

  When I saw this project months ago I instant loved it. I installed and start using it for real and... I found many bugs. Some tools were unusable.

  I really hope it's better now.

• by mathfailure on 5/4/24, 1:50 PM

  I once used it on a pdf file with a scanned text form trying to make it more contrast, as the scan was hardly seen. What I needed was basically just making dark stuff darker (up to the point of making it black) and maybe a bit thicker to make it more visible.

  The tool failed to help me with such a seemingly menial task, the improvement was very small. I even tried to repeat the step multiple times, but after like 2nd use there were no visual differences anymore (but the file's size kept actually changing).

• by junto on 5/3/24, 7:45 PM

  I’m looking at the list and trying to figure out if there is an API to extract the text from a PDF? Or retrieve it as vectors / embeddings?

• by Beijinger on 5/3/24, 7:18 AM

  At least it is open source. It never hurts to have something web based but I prefer an application. I use a commercial product for Linux. Master PDF Editor. It is good, but their copy protection sucks. Better don't forget to "deregister" ist before wiping your harddrive, otherwise your code won't work. But there is always customer service....

• by bustedagain on 5/3/24, 4:56 PM

  Can someone convert this mumble jumble of docker api endpoint locally environment into a working software that people can actually install and use on their pc/mac/phone???

  This seems too complicated to perform simple tasks of split merge edit not to mention the GBs of space docker and dependencies will take.

  Thank you

• by thrdbndndn on 5/3/24, 7:14 AM

  I see it uses pdfbox and pdf.js, so I assume it's mainly a frond end of these tools?

• by GlacierFox on 5/3/24, 8:51 AM

  Anyone got an alternative that wasn't developed entirely in ChatGPT?

• by kapildev on 5/3/24, 2:42 PM

  On the topic of PDFs, one thing I have always wondered is why there aren't any OpenSource pdf editors that are comparable to Adobe or Foxit. Does anyone know?

• by TechDebtDevin on 5/3/24, 5:27 AM

  I feel like everytime I log onto this site I encounter a finished project that's very similar to something I'm working on. I'm too slow (or project hop too much).

  Not that PDF related tools are uncommon but yeah I think people understand the sentiment.

  I'm also very surprised that <redacted> for profit companies in the Document-manipulating/signing/storing still exist outside of niche industries (healthcare, govt, law) that require audit-trails and other regulatory specifics. I guess SEO still rules.. If anyone wants to make some money call up all the biggest real estate firms in your area and ask them how much they spend on contract signing or related services (it's a lot) and then offer them to do this for half the amount ( I can sign 20-30k documents for <$100 a month, and could be cheaper probably) Your average real estate firm is paying .50c-$1 a signature if they are uninformed, there's a lot of the uninformed.

• by Jackson_Fleck on 5/3/24, 6:48 PM

  I’m not sure if this uses unoconv with LibreOffice but my heart goes out to anyone trying to develop Pdf/document manipulation tools with the current Python libraries. A thankless task.

  The more you work on this stuff the more you hate proprietary formats as well as having to rely on open source repos operated at the whim of a few good people.

• by ofrzeta on 5/4/24, 8:58 PM

  A subset of the manipulations such as split and merge can also be done with PDFSam

  https://pdfsam.org/de/

  https://github.com/torakiki/pdfsam

• by siva7 on 5/3/24, 9:02 AM

  > Originally developed entirely by ChatGPT

  I would be careful with such wording as one could easily come to the conclusion that this tool was developed by the ChatGPT team. Nevertheless that this software certainly wasn't entirely developed by ChatGPT which is technically not possible but WITH the assistance of an AI tool.

• by showerst on 5/3/24, 2:50 PM

  On a related note, does anyone have a good solution for highlighting arbitrary spans of text in PDFs? Trying to make viewing search results easier, but most of the solutions I've found are pretty lousy.

• by 2Gkashmiri on 5/3/24, 4:42 PM

  Is there a PDF templating tool that lets you GUI modify elements on a PDF to be used to generate reports and invoices for example ?

  Backend has Python and preferably agpl

• by haidev on 5/3/24, 5:18 AM

  How is this entirely developed by ChatGPT? Does the author claim that all the code in there was generated by ChatGPT?

• by sidcool on 5/3/24, 7:03 AM

  The test coverage is pretty low. I'm raising a PR for this. Code quality not the best.

• by n3storm on 5/3/24, 5:44 AM

  I hope they will add digital signing with certificates capabilities.

• by brnt on 5/4/24, 12:30 PM

  Now do a wasm version.

• by nikisweeting on 5/4/24, 6:41 AM

  I have some questions about the Github Star history, it's very unusual to see a ~1 year old repo with 20k+ stars.

  It went from 6k to 15k+ stars in a few days around 2023 Christmas when HN/Github/Reddit traffic is usually lowest, and I didn't see a corresponding social media post or announcement around that time with that kind of traffic.

  If I'm wrong and there is some big social media post / promo that I missed, I apologize, I'll eat my shorts!

  https://star-history.com/#Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF&Date

  https://www.google.com/search?q=%22stirling%22+%22PDF%22&sca...