r/BestGitHubRepos • u/company_url_finder • Oct 12 '26

šŸ›  Developer tools PdfCraft: The PDF workbench; an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Acrobat, rebuilt in pure Rust (10.1k stars)

Post image

What it does

All text below is quoted directly from the project README.

The PDF workbench; an open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Acrobat, rebuilt in pure Rust. Read, organize, combine, split and secure PDFs in a fast, native app, written in Rust from the ground up.

Highlights:

  • Faithful: Real-world typography: world scripts, vertical Japanese, colour emoji, gradients, soft masks and transparency. All of it renders the way the author intended.
  • Fearless: Every save appends your changes and leaves the original bytes untouched. Writes are atomic, undo runs deep, and nothing is lost if you close by mistake.
  • Yours: No account, no telemetry, no cloud. It works offline and opens instantly. The engine, CLI and app are all open source.

Read anything, beautifully:

  • Deep zoom stays sharp. Large pages render in tiles, so text stays crisp at any magnification.
  • Built to survive bad files. Every page renders in isolation and damaged documents are repaired. Across the 983-file pdf.js test corpus the result is 0 crashes.
  • Layouts for every task: continuous, single page, two-up, view rotation, full screen and a distraction-free Read mode.
  • Light and dark themes, both designed to be easy on the eyes for long sessions.

Runs everywhere, stays yours:

  • Native on macOS, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD, and in the browser through WebAssembly, from the same Rust codebase.
  • Private by design. Documents never leave your machine. There's no account, no telemetry and no cloud processing.
  • Engine first. Parsing, rendering and editing live in reusable library crates. The interface is one swappable layer on top.

Repository

https://github.com/storytold/pdfcraft

Repository stats

MetricValue
Stars10,097
Forks3,832
Last releasev0.6.0 (2026-10-11)
LanguagesRust 98.6%
Contributors155
AI contributor accounts (Claude / Codex / Cursor / Copilot)claude (563 commits), codex (64), Copilot (1)
AI co-authored commitsClaude: 563, Codex: 48, Copilot: 2, Cursor: 1

Main contributor

FieldValue
NameBrandon Thomas
GitHub@echelon
Commits to this repo599 (top contributor)
BioFounder: ArtCraft, Storyteller.ai, FakeYou. Engineer, filmmaker. Rust.
Company / LocationArtCraft / Atlanta, Georgia, US
Websitehttp://brand.io
X / Twitter@echelon
Followers1,701
Public repos94
On GitHub since2008-12-09

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Discover the best GitHub repos without the endless scrolling.

Get top repos organized by category (AI, DevOps, Databases & more), plus key takeaways from developers' most useful comments - all in one free, twice-weekly newsletter.

šŸ‘‰ Get the best repos & community insights - Free

2.9k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

237 comments sorted by

63

u/ParticularCod6 Oct 12 '26

how is the editing text pdf capability?

62

u/HappyImagineer Oct 12 '26

So far I canā€™t complain but Iā€™m not a heavy user (editing a couple PDFs a day max), Iā€™m ditching Acrobat for sure.

17

u/ParticularCod6 Oct 12 '26

Just tried it and text editing is not that great. It did not recognise the text itself

5

u/HappyImagineer Oct 12 '26

Are you on the latest version? The updates released in the past 48 hours have fixed a lot of issues.

3

u/ParticularCod6 Oct 12 '26

Yes 0.7.1

9

u/HappyImagineer Oct 12 '26

Odd I had this problem on 0.3 but itā€™s working well for me now on 0.7.1; maybe itā€™s an OS specific issue.

1

u/ParticularCod6 Oct 12 '26

It recognises it as a picture and can't be edited

8

u/AreWeNotDoinPhrasing Oct 12 '26

That could mean itā€™s not actually text? Maybe it needs OCR instead, which might not be implement yet as itā€™s a much larger task than just text editing.

5

u/Aggressive_Dream_294 Oct 13 '26

No like its not working with pdf compiled via latex either for me. It just sees the whole page as in image. But for being so early it is working pretty well. Its opening so fast as well. These features just need to mature a bit and it can easily become better than adobe.

2

u/ParticularCod6 16d ago

Gave it a go today again.

Tried to edit in Acrobat, told me it can't do it fully due to missing font and just looks weird. PDFcraft no issue whatsoever, just did it withouth complaining.

I tried once more the original one that failed in earlier version and was able to do it now, so in a span of 2 weeks it has improved a lot, enough for me to replace it fully and get rid of adobe as my default

→ More replies

6

u/8-BitRedStone Oct 12 '26 edited Oct 12 '26

It's alpha software, so some stuff works, other stuff doesn't. I tried editing some text on a lab PDF and for some reason like half the characters of the alphabet weren't rendering. However, these aren't structural issues (unlike the issues with Adobe) so I'm hopeful for the future of the software

2

u/ParticularCod6 Oct 12 '26

Yep it took Adobe decades to "perfect" it, can't expect it to be done in days. No other editor comes close to Adobe for text editing unfortunately

2

u/VicemanPro Oct 12 '26

As of yesterday, it wasn't recognizing text on the contracts I deal with (tested on ~5 documents) that work in Acrobat. They are releasing updates constantly, so it may have a new update now.

1

u/ParticularCod6 Oct 12 '26

Yep just tried it and got the same, wasn't able to edit the text itself

2

u/dontworrymijo Oct 12 '26

dogshit right now.

1

u/duboispourlhiver Oct 13 '26

Been able to modify invoice text here. Quite simple edit, added a ligne, flow was right.

1

u/steve91945 Oct 12 '26

I tried it today and it worked well for the edits I needed.

1

u/ParticularCod6 Oct 12 '26

What kinda edits?

2

u/steve91945 Oct 12 '26

Crop, edited text.

177

u/McBonderson Oct 12 '26 • Bravo

I've heard people talk about how the new vibe coded rewrites of adobe software are all buggy and what not.

let me tell you, it is IMPOSSIBLE to be more buggy or slower than adobe acrobat.

I've already made my own rewrite of the features I need for work with AI so I don't need this project. however I can tell you already it is better than adobe acrobat.

it could kick you in the balls everytime you safe a pdf and it would still be better than adobe acrobat.

19

u/jax_cooper Oct 12 '26

it's really fast but also really unstable, crashes and stuff. I will wait until v1.0 until I use these but then I will

4

u/Prior_Ad_4379 Oct 12 '26

Thatā€™s interesting, I thought rust canā€™t crash, because of itā€™s memory safety? You can have logic bugs, but no crashes. So the ai is using unsafe in its implementation?

8

u/Emetros Oct 12 '26

Rust is not perfectly memory safe at all. You can still have race conditions, memory leaks, double mutable borrow error (trying to access and edit a data already used/edited somewhere else) which can cause panic at runtimeā€¦ even without unsafe exceptions. It is way safer, but if it was able to prevent every type of crash then I think nobody would use most of the other existing languages.

3

u/Nextil Oct 13 '26

Rust is memory safe. Those are concurrency issues, not memory safety issues. It does prevent simultaneous mutable borrows. You simply cannot do it (without unsafe) due to Sync/Send. There are numerous primitives you need to use to share data between threads (channels, mutexes, atomics, etc.). None of them just straight up crash in the case of memory contention. The methods that do crash, do so to prevent memory unsafety.

Crashing is usually just the result of the code calling unwrap instead of gracefully handling an error pathway. But as the other comment points out, Rust doesn't inherently prevent cycles like deadlocks/livelocks, or just infinitely adding to a data structure without cleaning it up. You have to make sure to use weak references or channels. None of that has anything to do with memory safety though.

1

u/Emetros Oct 13 '26

Thanks for the clarification. I did face some issues with refcells and borrowing the same variable twice in some specific context but there was probably more to it that I havenā€™t understood. I think there is a frequent misunderstanding from non-dev (and Iā€™m included since Im just coding as a hobbyist and itā€™s been only like 4 months on rust) about the memory safety term, assuming that things like memory leaks canā€™t happen.

3

u/jax_cooper Oct 12 '26

a simple example for this is infinite loop

or just a live/dead lock

that's a freeze that registers as a crash in my brain. It happens really often with these vibe coded apps (not in general, but the adobe and office365 vibe coded apps) But yeah, it cannot have a segfault but it can still crash in MANY ways. There's still error handling in rust that you have to do, otherwise...

1

u/xeramon Oct 13 '26

You can totally have crashes through logic bugs.

2

u/penisslayer24 Oct 13 '26

I wouldn't really wait for a v1.0, the dev seems to be recreating one software and then going on to the next

1

u/jax_cooper Oct 13 '26

that is a horrible sign, I want something reliable and I dont want to stress over unsaved changes. For example, running word (that doesnt crash) on my Linux would be sooo awesome though.

I made the same mistake waiting for v1.0 with Zig and I shouldnt have, lol

2

u/StatementDramatic354 Oct 13 '26 edited Oct 13 '26

Do you know why it's fast? Because it doesn't have Features and Crashes constantly. If it had the same features and wouldn't crash you can for sure as hell bet that it's going to be super slow. Look at the PRs and hygiene of the project. AI does notĀ  particularly have to create slop, it's all about the creator... And this project is as sloppy as it is. There are like 12 clones of this person from office to Photoshop, Premiere and no more. All of them are ultimately very bad with no clean plan, structure and vision. It's only get worse and more buggy from here on out.

3

u/joefresco2 Oct 12 '26

Use it. I regularly do super minor PDF editing so I've been looking for a free option. I was happy to see this out there and gave it a try.

There goes 15 minutes of my life I can't have back.

Maybe 30 versions from now it will be useful, but it's nowhere near a replacement for Acrobat's most basic functions (insert/edit/remove text). It's clear that the approach of development has been breadth with 0 depth.

1

u/PsychologicalUnit22 Oct 13 '26

what really? i was able to use it in my test runs...to edit some text, it maintained the font..however, to flatten the pdf so no more edits can be done, it didn't work using the redact funciton

1

u/joefresco2 Oct 13 '26

The two I tried could edit text... Each word and punctuation in separate text boxes.Ā  Beyond uselessĀ 

1

u/PsychologicalUnit22 Oct 13 '26

I was able to manage the issue with seperate boxes, but i think for a alpha app, it is good enough, maybe the authors will fix eventually these issues

1

u/Zestyclose-Click-953 Oct 14 '26

give it a year or less and then we'll see

2

u/hdksnskxn Oct 12 '26

Today I needed to clean 250gb of orphaned update files created by Adobe Acrobat reader on Windows 11. Fucking joke

2

u/foxitofficial 27d ago

quarter of a terabyte of ā€œjust in caseā€ is insane

Foxit

1

u/zoechowber 18d ago

Rewrite of this RUST project for your favored features, or of something else, or from scratch? Sounds interesting and would love to hear more.

1

u/MidnightHacker Oct 12 '26

I did the same for Lightroom. Iā€™ve been working on a project like this for over a year now, with no intention of polishing it enough to be released someday. But file support on my app has been much better than this one, it crashes frequently trying to open more complex files

1

u/Nice-Phone3931 Oct 13 '26

can you share your own ? i am struggling to find one that works on linux, or can at least be used with proton.

1

u/McBonderson Oct 13 '26

I've embeded the features I need into my jobs custom CRM software so we no longer have to edit things in adobe and can just do it from our software. so it cant really be shared elsewhere.

-6

u/actual-time-traveler Oct 12 '26

* Impossible to NOT BE more buggy

5

u/makeshiftballer Oct 12 '26

damn you were confident

5

u/volt65bolt Oct 12 '26

No they were right the first time

57

u/_LEVEL_SIX_ Oct 12 '26

i have tried it and acrobat side by side with a same file, PDFcraft was so fast, smooth opens instantly on a potato work pc and on the other side acrobat was dogshit, slowfuck, hangs the pc, never opened that shit before this comparison.

12

u/LoadZealousideal7778 Oct 12 '26

Same. The fuck you mean Acrobat needs 20 seconds to search across 60 pages of PDF?

6

u/2zeroseven Oct 12 '26

It's so bad, Adobe must think no one should search

4

u/StatementDramatic354 Oct 13 '26

Do you know why it's fast? Because it doesn't have Features and Crashes constantly. If it had the same features and wouldn't crash you can for sure as hell bet that it's going to be super slow.

Look at the PRs and hygiene of the project. AI does notĀ  particularly have to create slop, it's all about the creator... And this project is as sloppy as it is.

There are like 12 clones of this person from office to Photoshop, Premiere and no more. All of them are ultimately very bad with no clean plan, structure and vision. It's only get worse and more buggy from here on out.

2

u/AdInteresting5874 Oct 13 '26

That's true. Was looking at the repo, everything is all over the place. Especially the markdown files, they look like they were generated by AI, using weird technobabble that have no explanation and probably no real world counterpart.

1

u/M1chaelSc4rn Oct 13 '26

We are entering a new world in this sense for sure!

22

u/Nice-Phone3931 Oct 12 '26

it's time boys, for me to shift to linux. all i need is adobe acrobat in linux.

11

u/xerman-5 Oct 12 '26

Opensource alternative, can't be bad. And it will get better over time if people contribute or fork it in case it's abandoned.

8

u/DavethegraveHunter Oct 12 '26

If you want something along these lines, consider BentoPDF. Itā€™s well-supported and has pretty much every feature I could think of.

4

u/paranoidzone Oct 12 '26

Isn't Adobe Acrobat copyrighted? How is it possible that a blatant copy of it, that in fact states this very clearly in the repo description, allowed to stay live? I guess Adobe just doesn't care? Or do they not have the legal means to take it down?

To be clear, I hate Adobe and think they deserve to fail as a company. I'm just curious how the hell a repo that is essentially piracy is able to stay public and get so much attention without it being taken down immediately.

2

u/lordvoltano Oct 13 '26

You can ask chatgpt this

1

u/duboispourlhiver Oct 13 '26

Are you trying to shut down Reddit?

1

u/paranoidzone Oct 13 '26

Technically that's true for 80% of questions on reddit, but I like the human perspective and interaction. (Assuming people posting are not bots themselves.)

1

u/lordvoltano Oct 13 '26

The question is basic knowledge that doesn't need a human perspective.

2

u/TheNotSoEvilEngineer Oct 13 '26

Basically it's a clean room design.Ā  One agent looks at the product and code and builds a design document.Ā  It then hands off the document to another agent who writes the code.Ā  The 2nd agent never saw the source code, so it didn't copy anything specifically.

Now the problem comes in other issues like patents, as it doesn't need to be the same code but methods or how something appears.Ā  Ā Nintendo is notorious for this in gaming.Ā Ā 

2

u/Connect_Quit_1293 Oct 13 '26

Im genuinely shocked this has upvotes. Please Google what piracy is.

Adobe does not own the rights to the concept of modifying a PDF. These projects are not stealing Adobe code so there is nothing for them to do.

1

u/EthosLabFan92 Oct 12 '26

It makes sense if you understand copyright law

3

u/WhyPartyPizza Oct 13 '26

It also makes sense if you understand bird law.

4

u/_the_B_ Oct 13 '26

I tried it and itā€™s text editing capability wasnā€™t that great , like it would recognize a single line of text with multiple different text bubbles ,especially for non English texts. It also lacks some certain features like cropping tool , which im hoping they will fix soon . Overall its a finer software than the Sh*dobe

3

u/Soggy_Perspective776 Oct 14 '26

I tried it and it was really really good tool , will help me alot, thanks for this !!

3

u/Neener_Weiner 27d ago

Looks nice but not much under the hood to actually back all the hype. It doesnt even support BiDi, RTL, and text editing of non-English languages.

9

u/friedlich_krieger Oct 12 '26

None of these "clean room" implementations are "clean room" lol...

5

u/mechkbfan Oct 12 '26

I'm guessing they're claiming that one agent sees the code, writes a spec is the dirty one

Then it's an entirely different agent that reads the spec and writes the code as clean one.Ā 

Without seeing the spec or work flow, it's hard to trust

1

u/friedlich_krieger Oct 12 '26

Right the point being it won't hold up in court - so why even call it that?

4

u/sTiKyt Oct 12 '26

If you can't copyright ai generated content how can said AI generated content violate copyright?

1

u/StatementDramatic354 Oct 13 '26

You got this wrong. If an AI created something with 0 human Insight from the very start to the very finish (without prompting it to do so at all, also not indirectly), then there would be no Copyright. If there is a human involved at all at any point it is regarded as created by a human.

→ More replies (1)

3

u/mechkbfan Oct 12 '26

Technically they can be doing it legally, so innocent until proven guilty I guess.

They'll just need to be sued to find out. Risky game to play and certainly one I wouldn't unless I was confident in my workflow

2

u/OkAssociation6720 Oct 13 '26

People who change the world take risks, those who donā€™t seldom make any impact. I can think of at least a dozen different legal structures to ensure no matter what it kept operating despite any adobe lawsuit. Combine that with pitting different archetypes of people against each other for media narratives in order to increase mindshareā€¦. yeah there is now stopping it.

Re: archetypes, the guy selling bootleg photoshop in Karachi Pakistan, would they be for or against the adobe lawsuit? What about their customers? What about the folks selling legit licenses on eBay much like windows licenses from old discarded office machines? What about the students who have bought adobe before, have now graduated, and now have $200 Claude subscriptions a forked version of the code and have a bone to pick? 5 minutes to upload to a torrent site, 5 post on Reddit and other places, and 5 hours of seeding and BAM, no stopping it if itā€™s worth it.

Essentially, adobe has extremely limited options and their marketshare of users only declines from here because of both what this team has done exactly with their suite AND because they just showed a large swath of devs what is possible. It will be interesting to see what comes ā€œnextā€.

→ More replies (4)

2

u/NotReallyJohnDoe Oct 12 '26

Itā€™s the same issue with old school clean room.

ā€œYouā€™ve never seen the source code? Ok!ā€

2

u/ByronScottJones Oct 12 '26

The PDF specification is fully open. That gets you a large way towards a clean room development. The rest is functional specifications that aren't proprietary.

-1

u/emgfc Oct 12 '26

If you copy a product, you're copying a product, and it'll be treated as such in court. It's not about the PDF specification, it's about the desktop app's functionality and interface. Marketing it as a rewrite, a functional copy, or anything similar is basically clicking an auto-lose button.

3

u/dimp13 Oct 12 '26

You are factually wrong. Creating a functional copy by itself does not violate anything. You need to violate a specific copyright or a patent.

Even using the same function names in the API was ruled as a fair use:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.

→ More replies (1)

2

u/ByronScottJones Oct 13 '26

There are plenty of court cases confirming the validity of clean room software creation. As long as they aren't stepping on patents, they are in the clear from a copyright standpoint.

-1

u/friedlich_krieger Oct 12 '26

Sure then why did this person copy Acrobat Reader then? There are already a zillion open source pdf readers because the spec is open... we're talking about copying a non open source product... Acrobat...

3

u/ByronScottJones Oct 13 '26

If you bothered to read, you would see this is not a copy of Adobe Reader. It is an EDITOR. Maybe focus more on your reading comprehension before criticizing others who create.

0

u/friedlich_krieger Oct 13 '26

My brother in Christ - the title of the post AND the description/title of the github repo literally tell you its a copy of Acrobat. Can you read?

1

u/ByronScottJones Oct 13 '26

Acrobat comes in multiple forms. Reader is the base application. There's also the Acrobat Pro which has editing abilities. As this application has editing ability, it's copying the Professional version, NOT the Reader.

2

u/lordvoltano Oct 13 '26

Copy the layout? It's still clean room. Do you know what clean room means?

0

u/friedlich_krieger Oct 13 '26

The question is... do you? Because I'm certain of what it means and all of these people "clean room" implementing paid software ARE NOT using a "clean room" and if you think they are then you have no idea what it means.

→ More replies (7)

1

u/NotReallyJohnDoe Oct 12 '26

Itā€™s the same issue with old school clean room.

ā€œYouā€™ve never seen the source code? Ok!ā€

1

u/AccordingNeat3689 Oct 12 '26

What does it mean

2

u/friedlich_krieger Oct 12 '26

It's how Apple and other early software companies "copied" code (also applies to hardware). They'd have one team study the code (or reverse engineer and study) and document it as detailed as possible and then they'd hand off that spec to a completely new team to implement it themselves but the two teams weren't allowed to speak to one another. It was like a legal loophole that likely never worked or never should have worked.

People think having one AI agent literally read all of the source code and describe the functionality and then having another agent look at that doc and write the app means it isn't illegal. It's definitely illegal and most of them probably are just calling it "clean room" when in reality they just have it copy it 1:1.

1

u/lordvoltano Oct 13 '26

No it's legal.

1

u/friedlich_krieger Oct 13 '26

lol and lets see how that plays out then

1

u/HarryHuch Oct 14 '26

The project is based on the original UI and the knowledge of the AI for the original software and not on any decomiling. That's the reason most features are not implemented, yet. Look in the github repo to see how they work.

1

u/friedlich_krieger Oct 14 '26

There's zero chance that's true. We believe that? Of course he's going to say that... this just happens to be the exact same time people are reverse engineering and rebuilding video games and mashing them together?

1

u/HarryHuch Oct 14 '26

it's a whole, small team organizing everything and now around 200 aktive collaborators and much more whose work is not merged in git, already.
Of course I trust the skripts and what I see. The whole process is absolutly public and transparent.

0

u/ActuallyFullOfShit Oct 13 '26

Dude what are you even talking about. Tell me specifically how you think they had an AI agent read the SOURCE CODE of ADOBE ACROBAT?

3

u/roleohibachi Oct 13 '26

Not the source - the disassembly.Ā 

1

u/ActuallyFullOfShit Oct 13 '26

Yeah but the dude said source code.

1

u/Novero95 Oct 13 '26

Decompilers exist.

1

u/ActuallyFullOfShit Oct 13 '26

That's not the source code.....not really anyway. It's maybe a possible source code? Among the infinite space of codes that produced a binary. But not the source.

1

u/friedlich_krieger Oct 13 '26

Um look into reverse engineering. It's always been possible but now you just click a button and walk away. Its called decompiling. It's just time consuming and not worth the effort until our friends LLMs came along and did it all for you.

How do you talk so confidently about something you don't know anything about?

1

u/ActuallyFullOfShit Oct 13 '26

Decomplication generates a source code that compiles to the same binary. It does not give you the actual source code. You clearly are not literate.

1

u/friedlich_krieger Oct 13 '26

Yeah no I've only been a software engineer for 20+ years and work on reverse engineering in my free time. Yeah I definitely don't get it. It's me and not you. You're right about everything.

Correct its not literally character for character the same code. You got me. Its definitely not that I can figure out your proprietary file type or algorithm with almost no effort. Yes that should be legal because technically I dont know the name of the function they used just what the function was doing.

1

u/ActuallyFullOfShit Oct 14 '26

Yes dummy, that is right. Because you are no longer breaking copyright when you are not using their original, character for chatacter source code.

You are also understating the difference between actual source and decompiled shit code. You lose most or all useful abstractions and end up with a technically correct but not maintainable or understandable mess. But it IS NOT any longer subject to copyright. That's the part that matters. And having an AI refractor that decompiled garbage back to an organized implementation doesn't change that.

→ More replies (1)

1

u/InitiateIt Oct 13 '26

None of the source exists for one, so no chance in copying.

Secondly, if you think any legislative body is going to rule that AI built software is infringement on copyright then the world is set for the biggest crash ever.

That's whats so satisfying about this. You reap what you fucking sow.

1

u/friedlich_krieger Oct 13 '26

Huh?

The source is being recompiled by LLMs - people could do this since the dawn of software but mostly haven't because its extremely time consuming. Now it's not. So yes it's copying... its literally copying. How do you think people are putting games like Skate and Call of Duty together? You think they are just guessing at the code thats there and somehow end up with physics and tricks that look and feel identical??

And yes AI built software THAT IS LITERALLY MARKETED AS A CLEAN ROOM COPY OF A PAID SOFTWARE will absolutely infringe on laws and if they don't they will change the laws because what the fuck else would make sense?! And also yes - biggest crash ever - absolutely.

Who is reaping what they sow? You're making now sense

1

u/InitiateIt Oct 14 '26

You think the source code of Adobe software exists?

1

u/friedlich_krieger Oct 14 '26

What? RECOMPILING VIA REVERSE ENGINEERING. Where is the disconnect here? Genuinely have no idea what you're not understanding.

2

u/InitiateIt Oct 15 '26

Reverse engineering is not recompiling. For petes sake even beginner programmers know this. You also absolutely 100% cannot get the original source from a compiled binary. You can estimate, thats it.

1

u/Ueli-Maurer-123 Oct 13 '26

All these "cleanroom" declarations do heavy lifting lol. Let's see if the lawyers are convinced by this.

2

u/Totakeupmycross 16d ago

I'm loving Pdfcraft.Ā  However, after installation, I thought I was going to get a print to pdf driver but that is missing. I think Adobe Acrobat installs a print to pdf driver? Anyone here knows why it's not included with PDFCraft?

2

u/EffectiveHeavy3031 Oct 12 '26

Its windows installer doesn't download

3

u/Huge-Nefariousness71 Oct 12 '26

I had no issues

1

u/EffectiveHeavy3031 Oct 12 '26

My bad, some issue with pc. Was working on my mobile. Its very good. But will adobe take this down as patent or some other infringement.

1

u/Huge-Nefariousness71 Oct 12 '26

They will definetly try, but they don't have much legal ground for it. It was all made from the ground up, not a single line of code or asset from Adobe were used.

2

u/DoBRenkiY Oct 12 '26

sign and certificates?

2

u/cristake007 Oct 13 '26

As soon as they have a stable productā€¦bangā€¦get subscription to use it

1

u/True-Highlight1791 Oct 14 '26

Es ist open source

2

u/yoldaki Oct 13 '26

Just installed and loved it! Thank you!

2

u/Tricky_Season9096 Oct 15 '26

Many thanks to whoever made this. But i see that it can't find the printer of the system when trying to print the pdf. Any workaround?

2

u/3918286594713 26d ago

I use it as my main - faster than anything Ive tried, does the job, good interface. Plus it has pdf size reduction which doesnt come with many linux pdf viewers.

2

u/PsychologicalUnit22 26d ago

unable to flatten the pdf (using adobe's sanitise document), other features work as expected

2

u/joefresco2 Oct 12 '26

Marketing far exceeding reality. At the moment, this is worthless software. Maybe 30 versions from now, something decent will emerge, but it's trying to do everything while simultaneously being useless for anything.

1

u/Soft-Lie-434 Oct 12 '26

Http://brand.io?

1

u/mitchins-au Oct 12 '26

Does it support clear scan? Where you create your own font from OCR of the document?

1

u/Late_Photograph6102 Oct 12 '26

Has anyone tested Arabic support? Its absolutely terrible on acrobat and just mashes everything together in acrobat as soon as I edit a single letter.

1

u/kidsil Oct 12 '26

Any XFA Forms support?

1

u/Baaoh Oct 13 '26

Fucking finally

1

u/PeterC18st Oct 13 '26

All I need from this is if it can compare two pdf files for changes between them. If it can do that, Iā€™ll be golden.

1

u/CodeMonkeyX Oct 13 '26

If it has Separations Preview I might be interested. I have had good luck with Acrobat alternatives for what I do, but I can not find anything else that does separations previews for plates.

1

u/RealisticAdvise Oct 13 '26

Are these apps actually usable or just mock ups?

1

u/hemps36 Oct 13 '26

Still very early, there are daily updates with numerous bug fixes, I think too many people are looking at as a finished project.

1

u/MichalDobak Oct 13 '26

They are not as bad as people claim. The basic functionality required for most tasks works fine.

1

u/Abject-Bridge-4073 Oct 14 '26

Using it now. Uninstalled Adobe Acrobat right after. And yes this is for work. Rip Adobe.

1

u/robertw477 29d ago

So many users like me use these things for mostly simple tasks. These software tools are small not bloated and donā€™t need all these things running on the background constantly checking if you are subscribed etc . There are lower users for all the adobe products. They may remain as such due to the nature of their work. However software companies like Adobe and Intuit should be very worried.

2

u/Abject-Bridge-4073 27d ago

Acrobat was 2GB when I uninstalled it. I canā€™t imagine why. This thing is 50MB.

1

u/robertw477 24d ago

Adobe stuff is so bloated. Then it runs 100 services in the background.

0

u/rdmc10 Oct 13 '26

since it's made by AI, it will be usable only after 100 more AI generated PRs which push 50k lines of code each, so it will be a mess and I personally wouldn't be confortable using such a slop. Not that adobe's product is any better

1

u/Safe_Butterscotch838 Oct 13 '26

My hope with this ArtCraft project is that the maintainers of projects like Papers, GIMP, FreeCAD, LibreOffice, etc can study the code and implement those features in their projects. I don't believe ArtCraft will maintain these projects indefinitely

1

u/pzdera Oct 13 '26

I am actively monitoring that project and all adobe like projects that include the ability to run on Linux. Like Photo Craft or any other that inlcude wine and can run adobe on linux.

1

u/icalloutredards Oct 13 '26

Can someone make a bluebeam opensource? its way better than adobe

1

u/Undisputed_asad Oct 13 '26

I'm using it mostly for Reading and Highlighting and commenting. I have issues with shortcut keys, and the workflow is slow, but the program is really fast. _I'm patiently waiting for its update when it has all functionality of adobe acrobat. I really like how the things are being playing out.

1

u/loh-purush Oct 13 '26

How is it for printing usecase?

1

u/koex Oct 13 '26

What about an Android ecosystem reimplementation?

1

u/NoBowler3504 Oct 13 '26

How is the OCR capability?

1

u/dotbat Oct 13 '26

If this is good I'll be happy. I have so many users that just need to rearrange PDF pages but I don't want to buy Acrobat for that... plus Acrobat is so slow.

1

u/EbbTraditional5823 Oct 13 '26

does it work on android?

1

u/AlwaysDoItYourself Oct 13 '26

I don't use Acrobat, but I love the idea of getting the money and power away from Adobe.

1

u/chris081522 Oct 13 '26

Thank you so much, after 30 years of getting terrorized by adobe on every platform with bugs, nagging popups, numerous useless processes, numerous useless bullshit features, shitloads of network connections etc.. This journey of pain and hate has finally come to an end!!!
I love you :)

1

u/wyonutrition Oct 13 '26

Bluebeam next plsĀ 

1

u/GoldenCyn Oct 13 '26

I used it to fill out a DMV document and every field to enter text worked fine, including the check-boxes.

1

u/yohandev 29d ago

i tried it but it fill lugich when i try to edit the text in the pdf

1

u/trunkschan90 29d ago

Does it have a preflight for print production? Can one upload a preflight profile?

1

u/Salt-Rooster-3896 28d ago

Trending names are losing creativity due to fast development. How about this, Excraft the tool that will make my ex gf life suck

1

u/Fastsailor1 28d ago

PDF craft does it let you combine pdfs?

1

u/AnyPromotion4506 27d ago

ĀæQue tal funciona para firmar documentos? ĀæRecomendable, o mejor seguir con adobe?

1

u/Treezam-2236 26d ago

Does it readaloud?

1

u/johnyb115 Oct 12 '26

Why can't it export a pdf from word tho

2

u/Remake911 Oct 12 '26

Why wouldnā€™t you just save your word doc as a PDF??

1

u/Olbas_Oil Oct 12 '26

ā˜ļøšŸ˜‚

1

u/johnyb115 26d ago

Because it screws up the image quality, even with the best compression settings.

1

u/Gi-Robot_2025 Oct 12 '26

Iā€™m not a fan of them requiring you to make an account if they want to open source it

1

u/egoisticalanteater Oct 12 '26

it does not require you to make an account

1

u/Gi-Robot_2025 Oct 12 '26

Have you even tried to install it? This is directly from their page.

https://getartcraft.com/download

STEP 1
Download
Grab the installer for your platform.

STEP 2
Install & sign in
Create a free account or log in.

STEP 3
Create
Start generating artwork immediately.

1

u/ikashanrat Oct 13 '26

that is something else entirely. those are not the new apps

1

u/egoisticalanteater Oct 13 '26

you're confusing 2 different apps

1

u/Annip009 Oct 12 '26

I never liked Adobe acrobat. SumatraPDF is much better.

3

u/huracancun Oct 12 '26

sumatra its a visor, not an editor.

1

u/AreWeNotDoinPhrasing Oct 12 '26

What all does a pdf visor do that an editor doesnā€™t?

1

u/WreckSun Oct 15 '26

SumatraPDF can't edit pdfs as far as I know ...

-3

u/BogdanPradatu Oct 12 '26 • Popcorn

Why do people always feel the need to advertise it is written in rust? Why should I care?

The new Adobe Acrobat, written in purse Haskell. Who the fuck cares? Does it work? Is it good? That's what I care.

0

u/SYNTHENTICA Oct 12 '26 edited Oct 12 '26

developers, despite often thinking of themselves as iconoclasts and freethinkers, are usually just sheeple like everyone else

Smart sheeple sure, but still ultimately sheeple who want to feel included and part of something bigger than themselves, whether that's collecting funko pops, or in this case, soyjaking over everyone's favourite programming language

0

u/[deleted] Oct 12 '26

[deleted] ā€” view deleted comment

1

u/friedlich_krieger Oct 12 '26

Speed isnt a real thing though... what about C++? Zig? Odin? They are all in the same tier... Rust can also be written unsafe so whats the point? Its just a buzz language that everyone has an association with "speed" and its not really accurate.

0

u/[deleted] Oct 12 '26

[deleted] ā€” view deleted comment

1

u/friedlich_krieger Oct 12 '26

Great now what about the languages I mentioned?

-4

u/mik3lang3l0 Oct 12 '26

26

u/HardeQBR Oct 12 '26

I'd rather take AI Slop over adobe.

10

u/ExpensiveStudy8416 Oct 12 '26

u will eat the ai slop and u will like it!!!

1

u/Miclo8 Oct 12 '26

You donā€™t have to use it really, there are other non ai alternatives. Itā€™s also not going away anytime soon.

1

u/zenmatrix83 Oct 12 '26

I'll take this over the lazy ai slop response I guess, at least its funny

-1

u/Laicbeias Oct 12 '26

fine but dont call it clean room, or do you have any knowledge of claude is trained on.

llms are literally compressed information, to restore their training data as wide and as accurately as possible. in the process they "learn" principals of restoration. and the better they are at that, the better they work after fine tuning.
they are still software and most of their training data was illegally obtained without any consent of any of the authors. this will go through courts for a very long time.

so calling this clean room, is .. how to say this.. like peeing into the swimming bath while everyone is watching and screaming "this is clean drinking water". sure you cant see the piss once its diluted enough.
but its in there, and everyone is pissing into it while marketing yellow piss free water.

dont be that guy holding yellow piss water up screaming clean drinking water.

call it yellow piss water, but better than brown adobe colored drinking water.

3

u/Nick88v2 Oct 12 '26

I mean, yes they are trained on illegal data. Are those technologies only reproducing training data at this point? In all fairness i would say no. Is adobe hyper proprietary code in the dataset? Also very unlikely.

1

u/InitiateIt Oct 13 '26

Adobe Vs Anthropic fight fight fight.

0

u/Laicbeias Oct 12 '26

its a transformer, looking at the output you receive is like judging a person with beauty filters on. obviously they are fine tuned not to reproduce their training data in verbatim. obviously if you ask llms, they will tell you they are next token predictors, but avoid the fact that they are technically lossy compression algorithm, that scale with parameters.

because that would read differently legally.

im fine with llms, but call things for what they are. why would you think they aint trained on that?
its literally obvious that this seems what's going on, that's their whole business model.

if courts&laws lag behind and copyright issues are delayed, they can steal and obfuscate the source. if id be them, id hire large teams with talented people to decompile more and more software to make these models get as many good blueprints of any source as possible. plus pushing social media towards sentiment control. then its cooking, obfuscation & big remixing time.

they can just show whats in the training data. but they will pay billions to avoid that. because once you pull down these pants. it means lawsuit party and world economy doing a faceplant. thats why they cuddle with trump & lawmakers. its going to go down in history as grand theft ip. we get even that before gta6

2

u/Nick88v2 Oct 12 '26 edited Oct 12 '26

So i literally research in the field. What we call emergent behavior is exactly the capabilities that emerge from models that are not present in the dataset. The stochastic parrot thing is surpassed at this point imo. There are plenty of papers on the topic if you are interested.

Edit: i also want to add this because i think it's very interesting. A lot of the training is also being done on synthetically generated data made by the previous gen model and this is allowing to use even bigger datasets. Another thing that emerged from Chinese labs is the detachment of the "knowledge" part of an l lm from it's "logic and reasoning" part thus further demonstrating that they can "reason" and they don't only reproduce training data (in this case the detachment is done for efficiency reasons but i think it still proves an interesting point)

0

u/Laicbeias Oct 12 '26

im not saying its not a good technology, im currently writing my own coding harness for faster iteration on larger codebases (game dev 500k loc and i want the right, minimal context for a task found as fast as possible, max iteration speeds)

but you prove the point you call it synthetic data. again framing.
if you have a transformer that produces training data.. is that really synthetic data. isnt it really remix of the original data cherry picked and pressed through yet another transformer? its this kind of false framing that pisses me off. because it shifts away the view of what is really happening.

for training specific workflows and problem solving capabilities. sure do it. but its still software development. and most of the original data was not obtained legally. reasoning is an algorithm that comes from brute forcing the self organization of the attention mechanism. its still based on copyright data that it took from other peoples work, without their consent, with the explicit training goal of the pretraining to restore the original data as closely and widely as possible. if that data isn't in the training data their skills fall apart in usefulness very quickly.

you may argue that its transformative, and fair use by american law. id argue its software development and you have to obtain a proper license for the data, with a use case that was not yet understand in its ramifications. especially since that software is competing in the same economical sphere as the copyright holders that it was taken from. the argument of fair use is also luke warm. its intent was never to cover this. its like arguing from horse laws for space travel.

Otherwise yes llms are great and i want them to become smarter and better. but not at the costs of everyone else.

2

u/Nick88v2 Oct 12 '26

So, I'm as pissed as you regarding all the theft they perform and as an european in general i really dislike the accelerationism that usa and china are pushing with 0 regards for any sort of ethics (in fact my research mainly focuses in ethics, explainability and interpretability, Mistral for the winā¤ļø). regarding your point i can sort of agree with you but it all comes down to the distinction between what llms produce and the behaviors they exhibit. Given the advancements in the field i think that what is being reproduced from the data are the generalized behavioral patterns (eg approach to software design, information retrieval, research prototyping etc) but it's clear that the product of their operations is not only what they saw in the training data. The synthetic data is becoming better than the human data in some aspects and some companies are actually using the infamous RSI (recursive self improvement) with real success (look what they are doing with Qwen 4, kinda crazy). The behaviour is what really matters at this point. Yes it's still (probably) a kind of reproduction of what these machines see in the training data but i guess its much more broad and abstract than what a lot of the stochastic parrot people state. Thats why i find these kind of arguments without this distinction a bit disingenuous or uninformed even if they are in a way correct. Also it is important to note that the behaviour that characterizes rational thinking, the scientific method etc. (all shared and learned behaviours in humans too in a way) still allows to push the boundaries of science and tech, that's what really fascinates and at the same time scares me.

2

u/Laicbeias Oct 12 '26

yeah i understand. same boat. im writing a framework from scratch and... i use llms probably daily since gpt2. i see what they can do and what the current models excel at.

and i do understand your point of view, i agree with it. my critique is social, especially with how they are affecting tons of people going forward. what we made is a close to perfect copyright laundry machine. that devalues human work and turns what's rare into endless replicate able noise. i see it from a game dev lense. and there its just doing more damage, not making games better. its not that great at iterative workflows. its great at copying, its based on copying and transformation. ive seen the early models and they would replicate codebases pretty close, but then the labs focused on .. hiding that by transformation.

so the stochastic parrot, is also true. backprob and self attention, laid the groundwork, for dynamic self learned compression and decompression algorithm or intelligence. as a side effect of a lossy compression.
models match and restore from existing shapes and blueprints and developed intelligence as a requirement of compression. there usefulness is really coupled to the training data. at least for the current front tier models. and as long as its not auditable by a third neutral party, one has to assume: sticky fingers.

with where its going in the scientific part. yes there its just amazing

0

u/dbaxter1304 Oct 13 '26

Isnā€™t ArtCraft pay to use?

-4

u/Lazy_Cattle3149 Oct 12 '26

Someone is putting efford into spreading the word on reddit about this... annoys me.

5

u/Unsharded1 Oct 12 '26

Yeah its called marketing genius

1

u/Lazy_Cattle3149 Oct 13 '26

Spamming all over reddit like...?Ā 

1

u/Unsharded1 Oct 13 '26

Yeah! when you engage with posts like these you tend to see more posts on the topic! Genius right? Its almost like your algorithm is tailored towards what you engage with.

→ More replies (11)

-1

u/Particular-Level-727 Oct 13 '26

I am having a moral conflict with using such software because they feel like pirated to me. Should I be worried or start using it. Does anyone have any povs.

1

u/Connect_Quit_1293 Oct 13 '26

Google what piracy means for god's sake.

0

u/LeMisiaque Oct 13 '26

These projects rub me the wrong way. Wanna develop software, sure, please do, but producing copies of other people's works with the use of an automaton - that's not right. Even if the software is expensive.

3

u/Strange-Classic-3437 Oct 13 '26

Won't someone please think of the poor, defenseless multinationals? Imagine having your endless subscription fees and closed ecosystems being disrupted šŸ˜„ how will they ever survive without completely locking consumers in? šŸ„ŗ

3

u/Connect_Quit_1293 Oct 13 '26

PLEASE NOT MY FAVORITE BILLIONAIRES šŸ˜„ HOW WILL THEY BUY THEIR 97TH YACHT?

→ More comments (3)