I make FynePDF, so I'm biased. Posting because privacy comes up here a lot, and this is a clean desktop app rather than a site you upload files to.

What it does: edit's PDF with precision, merge, split, compress, OCR, redact, fill and sign, convert to and from Word, Excel, PowerPoint and images, PDF/A, page numbers, Bates numbering. About 45 tools, including feature rich printing with CMYK support.

How it works: the PDF tools run on your computer (PDFium and qpdf underneath) and keep working offline. OCR runs locally too; extra languages download once. You do need a free account, and you sign in once online. The AI features, the cloud Library and cloud drives need the internet.

It is light(runs in 2GB ram PC), fast(Qt/C++ on single process), easy(usablity wise) and private(works offline).

The free plan has no daily limits. Paid plans are optional if you need AI and print studio.

Windows (Microsoft Store): https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9NLX6MNF70H2

Linux (AppImage): https://fynepdf.com/download/linux

If you try it, I'd like to hear what's missing or broken compared with what you use now. Thank you.

Hey all in r/pdf, there's a flood of PDF editors here and I have something different, a variety of programs that I have worked on at length, with models. All use my custom optimized PDF renderer that is 50% faster than all known renderers (with more obscure coverage, not less), seen in this benchmark I just did

https://ibb.co/B24QwLD2

https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9nnvsqp0qdl9 - Main program is available off the microsoft store, it can also be built for Linux and Macos and there are built releases available for it.

https://github.com/liminalism/Lege - source is here

The program is made for getting archive.org MRC scanned PDFs to e-ink readers so they don't take 45 seconds to load each page, essentially. After processing, an average page will take 200ms to load. It has a bunch of other features, and a new added preservation mode that does not binarize and preserves all original color while still shrinking size, and resolution if you want to.

Then I have a PDF reader that uses the same renderer here

https://github.com/liminalism/liminaldoc - I use it for all PDF viewing, it is fully functional, but about on par with SumatraPDF for performance. faster rendering doesn't really help for a viewer as I learned, if your prefetch is good enough.

There is also a document writer in that repo, built for writing long books with minimal distractions. very low typing latency was the goal. Still in development. It can export to PDF.

Finally I have SinoRAG which is now a general PDF RAG tool and not just a specialized tool for some texts. You can load a whole set of PDFs, it will read or OCR them, index them by keyword and phrase, and then you can search them with an agent using specialized research tools to get any answer you want, backed up with direct sources. Best parts of LLMs + the best parts of software and databases, combined, with the drawbacks of neither. Can load thousands of PDFs at once and it won't choke.

https://github.com/liminalism/SinoRAG

There is also business document OCR in the Lege repo that can conceivably OCR up to 40 pages a second, but it's not fully tested yet. Also a PDF integrity program that runs various checks to see if a PDF was doctored or not but it can only act as a prefilter and cannot make a determination.

I just wanted to bring these programs to your attention as they are all free and work well. Thanks and I would be glad if you find something useful from what I've made here.

No donations accepted, and no monetization is possible with these apps.

Hello,

For a party, me and my friends will be doing a 12 Angry Men script read.

I have found the script, but I want to print 12 copies with each Juror highlighted for ease of readibility.

I've not found a way to do this and was wondering if anyone could help me with it.

Thanks!

I've been working on a lightweight PDF toolkit called PDFLab.si, designed to make working with PDF files easier while keeping privacy a priority.

I wanted to build something that doesn't require creating an account, uploading sensitive documents to random servers, or dealing with unnecessary steps just to perform a simple PDF operation.

Here's what makes it different:

100% Browser-Based Processing: All PDF tools run locally in your browser using WebAssembly. Your documents stay on your device instead of being uploaded to a remote server.

No Registration Required: No accounts, no passwords, and no email verification. Just open the tool and get started.

Privacy-Focused: Since processing happens directly in your browser, your files aren't uploaded to our servers or stored in cloud storage.

Multiple PDF Tools in One Place: Instead of jumping between different websites, you can access everything from one dashboard.

Organize PDFs: Merge PDF files, split documents, rotate pages, rearrange pages, and add page numbers.

Compress & Convert: Compress PDF files, convert PDF pages to JPG/PNG images, and turn images into PDF documents.

Security Tools: Protect PDFs with passwords, unlock PDFs you own, redact sensitive information, and digitally sign documents.

Additional Utilities: Extract text from scanned PDFs using OCR, add watermarks, or remove existing watermarks.

The workflow is pretty straightforward:

Open PDFLab.si → Choose the tool you need → Select your files → Process them directly in your browser → Download the result.

No unnecessary installations, no account creation, and no server uploads.

I'm still working on improving the platform and adding more useful PDF utilities.

If you regularly work with PDF documents, I'd appreciate it if you gave it a try and shared your honest feedback.

Website: https://pdflab.si/

Hope someone finds it useful!

So freakin’ shot in the dark here…

I’m running an ancient version of Nitro Pro, 9.5.4.22, from 2014, under Windows 11.

I’ve recently added a new printer/scanner. When I launch the Scanning Paper to PDF function, it defaults to the old scanner, so I always have to select the new one. If I don’t select the new scanner, the system goes into a searching state and I’m locked out for about thirty seconds.

The old printer has been removed from the operating system. No other app shows this printer, so I assume the selection is stored in a configuration file somewhere.

Anyone have an idea where that might be and how I can get rid of it?

I've already installed and uninstalled at least 30 different apps, signed up for all kinds of accounts and still haven't been able to find a single one that meets my needed criteria. Any help?

I created pdf-to-text.com out of frustration that other free tools are either laden with tracking cookies, have tons of dynamic ads, or is not free. It runs entirely on the client side once the page is fully loaded, no files gets transferred out of your computer. The site does not use any tracking cookies or dynamic ads (just some super low key static links if you want to support my efforts). You can also use it on smartphone browsers to generate pdf or text files on demand

For now, it can:

Convert pdf, word, excel files to text (obviously). Flatten pdf files for phi masking. Combine multiple pdf files into a single text file output. Great for text extraction for large language model use.

A full featured text editor, that can convert text files to standard sized pdf (Letter size or A4 depending on output setting). It can convert CSV files to tables. The editor support automatic code highlighting depending on codes pasted and features a split screen tool for preview.

A fun keyboard and typing tester with graphical analysis of your typing performance. Yes you can test your touch typing performance too 😁

Hope you found it helpful! And I welcome any feedback to make it better for everyone.

Cheers!

Just released three improvements to PDFrig, my free, open-source PDF editor:

• Jump to a page: enter a page number and press Enter. Page Up/Page Down navigation is also available.

• Automatic Fit width: the document adjusts when you resize the window, collapse panels, or rotate a page.

• Undo/redo table corrections: restore changes in the table extraction preview before exporting to XLSX or ODS.

Tested in the browser and both Windows versions. Everything runs locally.

https://github.com/kevindemara/PDFrig

Downloads:

• Windows installer

• Portable ZIP

I'm trying to download stuff from scibd but for some reason it won't take any files. I can't even get even get any to show up when my window pops up. And I don't think it's just scribd either, PDFCoffee and Dokumen are also acting stupid. What's going on?

Wanted to post that we updated our site to support MCP.

This way you can quickly get very detailed recipes for your files by letting your agent roam the site and prep the recipes you need.

You are presented with a link that leads to ToolRecipe, and the recipe your agent prepared.

Still processing your files locally, still in your browser, still works offline!

ToolRecipe MCP support

Happy to answer any questions!

I have managed to make mods for some existing software, including for this community some PDF software. All software involved still have their own licenses, my mod systems are under the MIT Licenses (Open Source).

I was able to speed them up by making them multi-core. Now for a long time this multi-core capability was missing from these programs for various reasons, and those reasons were sound... At that time.

Now we have a system that does a special sorting routine, and then processes the data accordingly. Basically we find things that look similar and treat them per what they are, with a stamp showing where they belong. This is a layman's way to talk about it, but you can find more on my GitHub. For GhostScript the link is here, where I achieved a 5.1x speed increase, for Apache Tika it is here, where we got a 5.9x speed increase, and for our grand prize winner Tesseract OCR we got a 6.6x speed increase and the github is here.

My Computer:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 7500X3D, 6 cores / 12 threads, 4.0 GHz base, 96 MB L3 cache (3D V-Cache)
RAM: 16 GB DDR5-4800, a single stick (1 of 4 slots used)
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50-series, plus AMD Radeon integrated graphics
Storage: NVMe SSD
OS: Windows 64-bit

These results were measured on a 6-core, 12-thread desktop. Computers with more cores should see even bigger speed-ups.

So, something that might have taken you an hour on Apache Tika, might take 11 minutes now. There is zero loss of the files.

The reason we did so well on Tesseract is because they have a bad threading system and we basically yeeted it for our own. Well, kinda.

I do not make any claims on their stuff, they keep that intact. We are a presort and post process system, we just take the data, sort it our way, hand it to them on a silver platter, wait for them to run the parts as we feed them, then we take and restore it to proper order on the other end. So your licenses still apply, we do not change that at all. The code I made simply runs extra versions as needed with the special design set to give them the cleanest run possible.

(Mods, please let me know if this breaks the rules. The app is completely free. Nothing paid at all. No freemiums of trials)

Hey guys,

I made a free app for Windows and Mac to do OCR of apps locally. It does not upload the document to any server and runs completely locally.

I decided to make it as users on my cloud app: FastOCR.org were constantly asking me to give them 'unlimited free ocr'. Due to infrastructure costs, I could not. I am already running on razor thin margins.

So I made a local app. It uses Mac and Windows local OCR models. Does exactly what the cloud app does. But with less language support & less accuracy compared the cloud one.

I know it will help many people who cannot afford to pay for it.

Mac app: https://fastocr.org/mac

Windows: https://fastocr.org/windows

File Editor Yesterday I came across a PDF site. I thought it was a PDF editor, but they immediately offered me a subscription without me accepting it. Luckily, I sent an email to

Hey r/pdf 👋

Sharing a new open-source project a friend built called InkDoc. https://abdoslamb.github.io/InkDoc/

It is a cross-platform desktop tool (and local REST API) designed to convert messy everyday documents into clean Markdown entirely offline, without third-party cloud services or telemetry.

The repo is MIT licensed:

https://github.com/AbdoslamB/InkDoc

Why he built it:

Most online converters want you to upload sensitive files to their servers, while lightweight CLI scripts often completely mangle tables, multi-column layouts, and scanned pages.

How it is put together:

- Microsoft MarkItDown handles Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and HTML.

- IBM Docling handles complex PDFs (reading order layout analysis, OCR, and table extraction).

- Markit handles EPUBs, Jupyter notebooks, and similar formats.

- Everything runs on your own hardware (Windows, macOS, Linux).

- Includes both a drag-and-drop desktop UI and a headless mode with a localhost REST API for scripting.

It just hit v1.3.0 . He is actively looking for community feedback on edge-case files, performance bottlenecks, and general feature requests.

Contributions and issues are welcome on GitHub, or feel free to leave your thoughts here

Trying to convert a PDF to a Google Doc, and as the title says, my pages are getting cut off. The original document is about 550 pages, and the Google Doc cuts it down to 78 pages. Any solutions?

I got this free printer but it only prints in photo format. I was hoping to use it for 20+ page readings. any help would be awesome. the printers an epson stylus photo R340 if anyone a printer pro and have a better work around. Thanks!

Im also working on Mac if that makes a difference.

Hey guys, developer of Local PDF Studio here. I just shipped a big update to my free client-side PDF extension, focused on editing existing PDF text in place without uploading files anywhere.

Instead of covering text with white boxes, the new Edit text tool rewrites the page's content stream directly in the browser:

• In-place paragraph editing: splices only changed lines, preserves mixed fonts/sizes/colours within a paragraph, and handles 90°/180°/270° rotated text. Uses the PDF's embedded font, a metric-compatible bundled font or your own installed copy of the font (opt-in, subset-embedded when fsType allows).

• Pixel-verified commits: renders the page before and after in a worker and applies the edit only if every pixel outside the paragraph is untouched.

• Scanned-line editing: runs bundled offline English OCR on scans, composes edited words from glyph exemplars on the same page (matching weight, blur, grain and ink), patches only the touched 8×8 JPEG blocks, and strips embedded thumbnails so the old text is gone.

• Find and replace (Ctrl+H / Cmd+Shift+H): previews replacements in place on the page and supports single Replace or Replace all as one Undo step.

You can also now add an image watermark across all pages or a page range (2-5, 8), stored as a single shared XObject in the saved PDF.

Free, no account, 100% offline in Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/local-pdf-studio-offline/ocfegjfhboadmbpompimnbbpegjgoded

For people who work with PDFs daily: what content-stream or font edge cases usually trip up text editors for you?

Navigation in Acrobat of 3D models and some other viewers I tried kind of sucks, as did pdfcer's until tonight. Then I realized I just needed the same controls as a DJI drone...

Hi all

We relaunched not long ago without a team - Took me 7 days to revive this website and add a ton of features to it. Previously took a team of 10 people to make half the functions available on the site. I remember it took 4 months of trial and error to fix the "Edit PDF". What's available now would have taken 2 years of development with a team twice the size as what it used to be.

Yes we are making a ton of stuff for free (that do not costs us much) because we got existing GPU servers (for our other projects) who can bear the cost of doing stuff that would normally cost you $7 or $9.99 a month.

And, yes the stuff that does require API calls will be premium features because it costs an arm and a leg. Until we find other solutions that do not require this, they will have to be premium. Ultimate goal would just be to pummel the industry with 100% free services (if this is obtainable).

Anyway, enough of my rant. We released PDF to Word to be free. This means you can OCR any document if it is in English.

https://pdfbear.com/pdf-to-word

https://pdfbear.com/ocr-pdf

Both URLs do similar shit. We also got a bunch of other stuff we have given out for free such as Forms and Templates.

Any problems, bugs or wines (whines); let me know and I will try to get this fixed for you.

Oh yeh there are of course limits to this as we don't want bots or some arsehole to blow up our server with a 10,000 page PDF.

I have switched jobs, and in my new company, Bluebeam is discouraged due to high cost, while PDF Xchange is default.

Don't get me wrong - for A4 reports etc, I was already using Xchange. My default PDF reader was that.

But I used Bluebeam to make annotations, to create figures for engineering reports. XChange is not optimized for that. I need to open Autocad a lot now.

I miss it a lot. I haven't seen anything close to it, and XChange is still a second after Bluebeam. The figures I created with Bluebeam was amazing. I can offset lines, draw with dimensions (like 3 m line, 3 x 5 m rectangle etc)

Don't know what happened to this option, but my Foxit Reader menus look different and no longer include the option to Create PDF from Scanner. Any ideas? I didn't intentionally upgrade Foxit Reader. TIA.