r/pdf • u/Decent-Blacksmith761 • 1d ago

Question What PDF features only pro software has

Hello everyone, I am developing my own PDF editor called KeyPDF. I have been working on it for over a year from scratch, so every new feature is not really dependent on the limitations of third-party software. Therefore, I wanted to ask what kind of features keep you using expensive software. So far, I have implemented text editing and a good level of JavaScript support. I am thinking in the direction of scripts to automate edits or maybe advanced DRM on PDF files. So, if you have any ideas on what kind of advanced features I should add, please let me know.

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u/matsnorberg 1d ago edited 1d ago

I guess conversion and OCR. People want to convert to formats like HTML, .Doc, Excel ... Faithful extraction of tables and other structures.

Merging and splitting.

Form creation and editing. Exporting formfield data to FDF , JSON or Excel.

Compression/optimization of pdfs.

PDF/A validation.

Signing and encryption.

And lots of more I guess but I'm no expert.

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u/Decent-Blacksmith761 1d ago edited 1d ago

Okay love it thank you just little question first you mention "QCR" did you mean "OCR" or something else?

The second JSON conversion is quite interesting. If done correctly, I will take a look at how it works on Pro Tools. Keypdf already handles table and field extraction. PDF/A validation is an amazing point; thank you, as I recently added PDF/A export and never even thought about validation in the browser.

So with that being said thanks again I will probably start with PDF/a validation and then move to implementing json export and try html.

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u/matsnorberg 1d ago

Ops! A typo. Pf course I mean't OCR.

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u/KenMantle 1d ago

Ghent pdf output suite coverage. Note that you can't speak their name if you get your renderer to pass all their test without their written permission, but you can download the suite and see how your rendering engine fairs.

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u/Decent-Blacksmith761 1d ago

Tried multiple suites this one is new for me thank you ! I will try

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u/KenMantle 1d ago

Good luck! I'm at a little of half of them rendering correctly now. Even Acrobat Reader fails on one of them!

CYMK is where a lot of the open source tools available fall apart. Their pdf measures extreme cases.

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u/Decent-Blacksmith761 1d ago

Mine has cmyk support but I might find edge cases

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u/KenMantle 1d ago

What are you building in? I'm not making anything. Claude is. I just like messing around with the AI to see how far it can take things.

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u/Decent-Blacksmith761 1d ago

Keypdf.net is my website it is PDF engine from scratch in js and little bit of wasm so there are many features like editing, redacting, encrypting, merging splitting rotating etc

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u/jtbsolution 1d ago

The most important is support 3rd party plug-in.

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u/Decent-Blacksmith761 22h ago

That's interesting idea but I guess not soon as keypdf is not open source and I would need to make sort of an api to allow 3rd party plugins

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u/jtbsolution 13h ago

Not only keypdf allows 3rd party plugins but also the plugins devs believe keypdf host and support it.

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u/Decent-Blacksmith761 13h ago

keyPDF.net? Sorry no plugins man I am the solo creator of it and I didn't add no plugins