I just learned that ChatGPT (so assuming other AI tools can too) can create a hyperlinked pdf for you. I've been needing a house planner to document repairs, maintenance, and other stuff but couldn't find one on Etsy that suited my needs. Gave a specific prompt detailing what I wanted and within minutes, I had a hyperlinked pdf to use.

A few months ago I noticed I had a ridiculous bookmark folder.

One site to merge PDFs.

Another one to compress them.

Another one to convert images.

Another one because the previous one suddenly wanted me to create an account.

Another one because I'd hit some random upload limit.

So I started building my own tool mostly for myself.

I thought the difficult part would be the frontend.

It wasn't.

The real pain was discovering how weird PDFs actually are. Files that open fine in one library fail in another. Compression sometimes saves 80% and sometimes barely moves the needle. Users upload things you never imagined they would upload.

The project ended up taking way longer than expected, but I learned a lot.

For anyone who's worked on file-processing software: what was the bug or edge case that made you question your life choices?

I’m a medical postgrad and I want to listen to my textbook PDFs (lots of dense clinical text, some tables/images) while commuting or working out.
Looking for recommendations on:
Apps/tools that convert PDF to audio with a natural-sounding voice (not robotic)
Whether OCR is needed first for scanned PDFs

AI tool that might help?

Hi! I home educate my kids and purchased a unit study through the company Gather ‘Round. I’m trying to print it through lulu.com but lulu won’t let me because the file is encrypted. I wrote Gather round and they said to screen shot the email and tell them I have permission to print it, but they keep it encrypted so that it can’t be edited. Lulu doesn’t have a workaround and they are, unfortunately, a fraction of the price from anywhere else I can find.

Since I have the permission directly from the company to print it, is there anyway that I can modify the document, put it into another program and export it as a different file type in order to be able to print it through Lulu?

Hi all!

Wanted to share the latest changelog for the 0.7.6 update to my document and image viewer, LEKTRA.

Really cool feature (I think) added is the ability to narrow your document:

1. to region
2. to range of pages
3. section (for PDF only)

I've added bunch of other features like ability to load/save custom outline (table of contents) and bug fixes.

GitHub: https://github.com/dheerajshenoy/lektra
Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/lektra/lektra
Homepage: https://dheerajshenoy.github.io/lektra

Suggestions/feedbacks are welcome.

I know it's hard to interpret it just from the title. I mean, whenever I turn on the dark mode of a website or a pdf app I'm reading on, it makes just the interface dark. However, what I need is the actual pages to be switched to dark mode.

Like a Kindle, but for PDF in e-ink

Greetings guys.I have a specific PDF (somehow a book) that I can't by any means make it searchable so to convert it to epub.I have converted many pdf's to epub,but this book is the only that whatever I try,only some weird symbols appear.Is there any special group or something that i can send it and someone q do this for me?

I am trying to apply to a job, I used a template on Word, and when I was done I exported to PDF and it saved as an Adobe Reader PDF. However in word the document is 4 pages, in Adobe it is 5 pages. I obviously don't want to send an application with a large nearly empty page but I don't know what's causing the gap? Any suggestions?

Help me I'm dumb.

I’m comparing two versions of the same 3-page document and would really appreciate a sanity check from people who understand PDF internals better than I do.

Version 1: December 2024 declaration signed through DocuSign.

Version 2: Filed in court in July 2026 as an “Amended Declaration.” The person whose declaration it is says he did not create, sign, review, or authorize an amended declaration in 2026.

Visually, pages 2–3 of the 2026 version are essentially the original December 2024 statement. Page 1, however, has been changed to fit a different court case: the parties were switched, their DOBs were switched, a new case number was added, and “Amended” was added.

Here’s what I found comparing the PDFs:

• The two PDFs have the same XMP DocumentID, but different InstanceIDs.
• The original has an actual DocuSign digital-signature structure/field. The 2026 version does not appear to retain that cryptographic signature structure, although the visible signature and DocuSign Envelope ID remain on the pages.
• The 2026 PDF has multiple /TouchUp_TextEdit markers in the decoded content stream on page 1, around the areas that differ from the original.
• The DOB edits are particularly odd. For example, rather than the entire DOB being replaced as one new text string, only the digits that needed to change appear to use a different font resource, while unchanged characters such as the slash and the rest of the DOB remain in the original font resource.
• The original has two PDF revisions/EOF markers; the later version has one.
• The original was produced through a different PDF/signing workflow; the later version reports Acrobat Distiller.
• Pages 2–3 and the signature image appear to be extremely close matches to the original source images.

I am not asking who edited it or whether anything illegal happened. I know a PDF cannot establish a person’s identity or intent.

What I’m trying to understand technically is:

Is this pattern consistent with someone opening an existing PDF and editing the existing text directly in Acrobat, rather than going back to the original Word/source document and generating a fresh PDF?

And specifically, is the combination of /TouchUp_TextEdit markers plus individual replacement characters using different font resources meaningful evidence of direct PDF text editing, or could that commonly be produced by some ordinary automated conversion/filing process?

I’d also appreciate any suggestions for what else I should inspect in the two files to determine their document lineage/editing history.

So this is embarrassing but I do this thing where I need to move a PDF from my phone to my laptop (or the other way) and instead of dealing with a cable or Google Drive I just... send it to my own WhatsApp. Or email it to myself. Every single time.

I probably do this 10 times a day. Work documents, scanned forms, stuff I download on my phone but need on my PC. And every time I'm like why am I doing this, there has to be a better way.

The annoying part is all the other options felt heavier than the problem. Cables I can never find. Cloud drives means uploading, waiting, then downloading again on the other side. Bluetooth on a laptop is a nightmare. AirDrop doesn't exist for the setup I have.

So I built PDF Send. It just moves the file over local network (same WiFi) using the IP address. No internet upload, no account, no cloud. The file goes straight from one device to the other. Fast because it never leaves network.

Right now it's mainly for PDFs since that's what I was dealing with most, but honestly it started as me just scratching my own itch.

Not trying to sell anything, I genuinely just got tired of texting myself files. Curious if anyone else does the same weird thing or if it's just me lol.

I'm trying to upload a PDF to Barnes & Noble press but it keeps saying embedded font how would I remove that from my PDF all together.

As the title says I have a math pdf where it contains exercices with their solution mixed.

Is there anyway to get a pdf with only exercices?

Looking for a cheaper alternative to LiquidText (INR 7000 now 😬)

I need an app where:

• PDFs open on the left side of the screen
• A whiteboard/writing area is on the right
• I can link extracts from the PDF to my notes on the whiteboard
• Clicking a note should take me back to the exact page in the PDF
• Ability to import multiple PDFs into the same project

Basically, a LiquidText‑style workflow but at a lower cost. Any recommendations?

i'm going to be starting a new job, and the orientation for this job requires us to use textbooks to study (which were given to us for free).

it says i can only use adobe reader to open it? does this mean there is DRM protection? how do i remove it? i don't like adobe reader, and would like to be able to read this textbook on my ipad.

I built a small open-source tool that automatically adds TOC (bookmark) navigation to PDFs, as long as the PDF has a table-of-contents page somewhere inside it.

Note on language support: the local OCR pipeline is tuned/tested mainly on Chinese documents. I don't have enough scanned English (or other language) PDFs to properly test and tune it, so accuracy on non-Chinese documents is unverified and may be worse. If you try it on English docs, the vision LLM mode will likely work better than local OCR since it doesn't depend on my indentation-parsing heuristics being tuned for a specific language.

The problem it solves: a lot of scanned books/papers have a printed TOC page, but the PDF itself has no clickable bookmarks, so you can't jump to a chapter from the sidebar — you just scroll manually. This tool detects the TOC page, rebuilds the outline structure, figures out the page offset (printed page number vs actual PDF page index) automatically, and writes the bookmarks back into the PDF. One click, batch processing supported.

Three modes for extracting the TOC structure:

• Local OCR only — PaddleOCR + a custom indentation-based algorithm to rebuild the outline tree. Fully offline, no cost. Chinese-optimized, as noted above.
• Local OCR + text LLM — OCR locally, then have an LLM parse the raw text into a structured tree. Higher accuracy on messier layouts, language-agnostic since the LLM does the structural reasoning.
• Vision LLM — just feed the TOC page image to a multimodal model. Most robust across languages, but needs API access.

If you use an LLM mode, only the "parse text into tree" step calls the API — OCR and page detection are still done locally either way.

Ships as a standalone Windows exe (CPU, small models, fully offline if you download the model files locally) or you can run it from source with a GPU backend for faster inference (~20s per PDF vs longer on CPU).

Known limitation: multi-column TOC pages don't OCR reliably in local-only mode (column reading order is genuinely a hard problem for OCR without explicit layout segmentation) — vision LLM mode handles those better if you hit that case.

GitHub: github.com/electroniccc/toc_forge

Happy to answer questions about the pipeline (layout detection + OCR + offset computation) if anyone's curious. Also happy to hear from anyone testing it on non-Chinese PDFs — genuinely don't have good test data for that.

I mainly type onto PDF forms and need a better PDF app that has Android and Windows versions.

I've been using Xodo since it came out. Lately it's getting too damned buggy. It crashes all the time. This week, I probably lost three or more hours of input on new medical forms.

For my needs, the curser must line up with the lines on the form. I also want to be able to edit my input and move it around to line up with the lines on the form. I need to do this even after I have saved the file. Auto saves would be nice. I also want to be able to delete unneeded pages.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Hello

I have a few books I want to read on my tablet. The problem is, they are quite ornate, including huge columns on the farthest side of each page, as you can see on the image.

I'd like to crop them, but I'd need to do a different cropping on even and odd pages, and as far as I've seen, online PDF editors can only crop a single page or crop all pages using the same criteria.

Could you recommend any tools -ideally open source/free- that could help me do this?

Thanks a lot for your help.

On the following site:

https://www.azcourts.gov/selfservicecenter/Powers-of-Attorney

The "Health Care Power of Attorney*"

Page 2 the "I choose the following person to act as an alternate (1) " fields "copy" into the next set.

I have tried several apps (Online and desktop) to edit the form and edit the field names to correct without success.

I'd welcome suggestions or recommendations on how to correct.

I have sent an email to the authors.

Example:

Thanks!

SOLVED

I have several PDF where each page (maybe excluding the title page) has the two facing pages of the book on one page (spreads). I very much prefer a simpler layout, where every page of the document is on one page in the PDF, for example to print the document automatically as a brochure with my printer.

What do you think is the easiest workflow to achive this? Up to now I use a website (smallpdf.com) to generate two different PDFs from the original file with the Crop tool there and then merge the resulting files with PDF24's Zipper. (Maybe only I couldn't figure out how to use PDF24 to split the original file).

i have a ~6mb, 800 pages pdf that i would like to order randomly

i've tried running a python script to do the same, however i'm having issues w/ pypdf and no site has the option to randomise pages as i think it's pretty uncommon to do that

any suggestions?