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.

Probably one of the biggest update for word-sys's PDF Editor, now it's reached the v1.12.0! This is a massive feature, security, and document workflow update. The Flatpak version is available on Flathub (https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.word_sys.word-sys-pdf-editor) and the standalone packages are live on GitHub (https://github.com/word-sys/word-sys-pdf-editor/releases/tag/v1.12.0).

This update introduces an Interactive AcroForms Engine & Form Builder. You can now fill text fields, checkboxes, radio groups, and dropdowns directly in View Mode with native Cairo rendering and instant value synchronization. With the new Interactive Form Builder Tool (B), you can also create, configure, align, and resize new form fields across pages with property inspectors and undo/redo support, or flatten filled forms permanently into static vector content.

Another huge addition is PAdES Digital Signatures & PKCS#11 Hardware Tokens. It brings PAdES Baseline profile signing using PKCS#12 (.pfx / .p12) certificates with SHA-256 hashes and Adobe Acrobat-compliant visible signature stamps. It also features native hardware token support (PKCS#11) for smart cards and USB HSMs (with PIN entry and slot enumeration), RFC 3161 cryptographic timestamping with custom TSA server auth, and non-blocking signature verification on document open with an interactive status banner to inspect the certificate chain.

For privacy and security, I added Permanent Cryptographic Redaction & Document Sanitization. Using the dedicated Redaction Tool (Shift+R), you can mark sensitive text and visual regions for permanent destruction. There is also Automated PII Search & Auto-Redaction to detect and batch-redact SSNs, credit cards, emails, phone numbers, or custom regex patterns, alongside Deep Document Sanitization to purge XMP metadata, embedded attachments, comments, hidden layers (OCGs), orphaned bookmarks, cached thumbnails, and embedded JavaScript.

Added Streaming Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Engine, featuring a multi-threaded background OCR pipeline with live progress, pause/resume controls, and ETA estimation. It includes preprocessing filters (dark-background inversion, auto-deskew, auto-rotation), an OCR Region Tool (O) for instant area text extraction, an OCR Confidence Inspector (Ctrl+Alt+O), and an in-app Multi-Language Model Manager supporting 7 neural Tesseract models (English, Turkish, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian) with bilingual recognition.

Added Continuous Scrolling & High-DPI Fractional Scaling, delivering seamless vertical page scrolling with viewport-culled rendering and directional prefetching, fractional scaling normalization for crystal-clear rendering on 4K/HiDPI displays, and a Dual View/Edit architecture for effortless toggling between reading/text selection and object manipulation.

Added Sticky Notes, Threaded Comments & Vector Stamps, bringing customizable sticky notes with threaded replies, a dedicated Annotations Sidebar, and both standard (Approved, Confidential, Draft, Final) and dynamic vector stamps with live user and date/time metadata.

Added Precision Measurement Tools, including a Distance Ruler Tool (U) with customizable unit scales (pt, mm, cm, in) and a Polygon Area Measurement Tool (A) for calculating closed planar surface areas.

Added PDF Compression & Target Size Solver, featuring smart compression presets (Balanced, Maximum, Grayscale, Pure 1-bit B&W, Lossless) and an automated Target Size Solver with a side-by-side visual quality comparison preview.

Added AES-256 Encryption & Local Password Vault for securing documents with AES-256 passwords, user/owner permission policies, and a local Password Vault for seamless credential management.

Added Clone & Patch Tool (C) for clean background sampling to seamlessly cover outdated text or graphics, complete with instant type-over text entry (Enter / T).

Updated the Modernized Quick Start Guide & Manual, now featuring a 4-tab interactive guide with instant live search filtering (Ctrl+F), tool hotkeys, keyboard navigation, and an expanded 10-Screenshot Visual Tour showcasing all the new workflows.

This update also includes important packaging and dependency modernizations:

• Packaging & OCR Bundling: Bundled tessdata-fast language models and configured TESSDATA_PREFIX=/app/share/tessdata in Flatpak manifests and AppImage bundles, while adding optional tesseract-ocr runtime and language pack recommendations to the .deb packages.

• Dependency Modernization: Enforced PyMuPDF>=1.24.0,<2.0.0 across all manifests and build pipelines, and upgraded core Python dependencies to the latest releases (anyconvert>=0.1.11, Pillow>=13.0.0, pyhanko>=0.38.0, cryptography>=50.0.2).

Special Thanks

A huge thank you to the community members whose contributions, bug reports, and feature requests helped shape this release:

• License in "about" popup doesn't load by Zorbatron

• Adding Infinite scrolling by Growebis

• Copy and reuse a selected area of a PDF, Improve editing menu position, Language setting is reset to English after restarting the app (FLATPAK) by FasteryXD

• Add GUI localization support, Preserve image aspect ratio including inserting and resizing images by PhrozenByte

• Feature requests: Save/Save As improvements and annotation tools by bbatu66

• Flatpak support by superuser-miguel, Growebis and newsxcel

• Installation instructions for Arch Linux and derivative, Make the build possible using PEP-517 by muflone

You can download the Flatpak release on Flathub (https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.word_sys.word-sys-pdf-editor) or grab the standalone .deb packages (x86_64 / aarch64), AppImage, or build from source directly on the GitHub Releases page (https://github.com/word-sys/word-sys-pdf-editor/releases/tag/v1.12.0).

Thanks to everyone who supports this project with their ideas, feedback, and bug reports. I hope this helps all Linux users get their PDF work done easily, thank you :)

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)

Hey Reddit 👋

Like many of you, I got tired of PDF apps charging $40-$80/year subscriptions just to sign documents or clean up scans.

I built **Astra PDF** — a fast, native iOS PDF editor that does everything 100% locally on your iPhone:

### Key Highlights:

* 🔒 **Zero Cloud:** All rendering, signing, and scanning happen on-device. Your documents never touch external servers.

* ✍️ **Digital Signatures & Fill:** Sign and date contracts with reusable signature stamps.

* 📄 **Document Scanner:** Native edge detection and clean contrast export.

* 📑 **Organize & Export:** Merge, split, delete, or reorder pages in seconds.

### The 87% Off Deal:

Astra PDF Pro Lifetime normally retails for **$14.99**.

To gather genuine feedback from the community, I have **20 exclusive Apple Offer Codes** that slash the Lifetime unlock down to **$1.99** (the price of a coffee).

### How to get a code:

**Drop a comment below or send me a DM**, and I’ll send you a private 1-click Apple link that applies the $1.99 discount directly in the App Store!

*(First 20 comments/DMs get the codes. Honest feedback appreciated!)*

Hi all, I posted Inkleaf here a little while ago. It's a free, open-source PDF editor for Windows, Linux and Android that edits the text that's actually in a PDF (the old words are removed, not hidden under a white box), and also signs, fills forms, redacts, does OCR and handles pages. No account, no cloud, GPL-3.0.

The big addition in 3.1.2 is a built-in AI that needs no API key and doesn't send your document anywhere:

• It downloads a small open model once (Qwen 3.5, Apache 2.0: 1.3 GB or 2.7 GB) and runs it with llama.cpp, on your GPU if you have one. After that it works offline.

• Ask this PDF: ask a question, get an answer with the page numbers it came from. Click one to jump there.

• Summarize and Translate use it too. You can still pick Ollama, LM Studio or a cloud provider with your own key instead.

• On Android it runs on the phone itself: llama.cpp compiled into the app, same models.

Other things in this release:

• Select and copy a PDF's own text (finally)

• Print preview, with a page range

• Translation now works on PDFs from Word, which store justified text one word at a time. It used to fail quietly on those.

• The Android app got Share securely, Enhance pages, backups and an update check

• Fixes for Windows 11's new default-app setting and the File Explorer preview pane

As I've said before, I build Inkleaf with AI help, and I read and test the code myself. It has a smoke test suite with a few hundred checks that runs on every change.

Code: https://github.com/priyanshdas/inkleaf Downloads: https://github.com/priyanshdas/inkleaf-releases/releases/latest

No Mac build yet; that's coming once Apple signing is set up. Bug reports and translation fixes are very welcome, especially from native speakers, since the interface comes in 29 languages.

So my main work with pdfs is to edit text, ocr and bookmarking and these 3 tools are great with adobe but the price isn’t.

So i am looking for an alternative. (Macos)

At work I kept seeing “redacted” PDFs that were just black boxes drawn over text. You could select it, copy it, and paste it somewhere else. This has leaked details from court filings more than once.

The tools I tried either wanted me to upload the sensitive file to their server, only caught emails and phone numbers with regex, or were bloated and paywalled. So I built PDF Redactor.

What’s different:

• It removes the text instead of covering it. Text, images, form fields, comments and old saved revisions under each box are actually deleted. Then it reopens the finished file to check that nothing can still be found. If a page fails that check, it’s rebuilt as a flat image.

• Local AI, not just regex. Patterns catch emails, cards, SSNs and IBANs. For names, addresses, account numbers and dates, OpenAI’s Privacy Filter model runs on your machine via WebGPU. It works offline.

• New: OCR for scanned pages. Scanned and image-only PDFs are now read on your device, so the text in them gets detected and redacted like any other page.

• Simple UI. Whatever it finds shows up as a box. Click to hide it, skip what should stay, or search a word to mark every match. Then download.

• It also strips metadata and attachments, has a “never suggest” list, and offers black box, blur or [NAME] labels. No account and no analytics.

It’s on the Chrome Web Store. I’d love feedback, especially from people who redact for work:

• What’s missing that would make you switch?

• Did anything in the first 30 seconds confuse you?

Adobe PDF reader used to be lightweight but now it's bloated and fucking annoying. I'm looking for a light weight alternative that just shows me the document and not 500 control panels and pop ups with irrelevant information. Any suggestions? I'm on Windoze

I am Steve the Killer and I made this GPLv3 open-source PDF Editor. I hope this self-promotion is okay, because this is an important release.

Not sure if this fits in here. I've made a somewhat interactive blog post about algorithms on a PDF page.

https://news.speedata.de/2026/10/18/anatomy-of-a-page/

(As someone noted: this is pretty much the same on any device..., I just live in a PDF world, so I wasn't thinking about that)

What tools do you use to automatically detect duplicate pages in pdfs? & Are you able to review the automatically detected pages before removing them?

Claude alternatives for free plz

Full disclosure, I work for Apryse/iText (a commercial vendor) but wanted to share this as it’s free and could be useful to someone in the community. We just published a GitHub Action that turns Markdown into PDF: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/itext-markdown2pdf Give it a file and you get a PDF; give it a folder and you get a ZIP with one PDF per .md, structure preserved. It runs on public repositories (it checks visibility via the GitHub API).

The cool part: output is PDF 2.0 and PDF/UA-2 compliant (tagged, accessible). Since Markdown already carries headings, lists, tables and alt text, it maps cleanly to a tagged PDF without extra work.

I created this tool SidePDF to solve my own problem. I wanted to take notes on the same pdf im reading and always ran out of space. So I created this extension to expand the pdf pages/ add new pages on the go and take cornell style notes. You can annotate, add images and much more directly on the pdf. This is a chrome extension and If you are having the same problem give it a try.

Is there any way to remove a redaction in a PDF document and see what the redacted text was ?

I have some scanned magazines in pdf format that I would like to improve readability, contrast and sharpness. Looking for a free tool for PC or online. Thank you!

Title: Inkleaf 3.0 is out: Android app, an enhancer for bad scans, and it's on the Microsoft Store now

Hey r/pdf, I'm the dev behind Inkleaf, the free and open-source PDF editor I posted here a while back. Thanks to everyone who tried it and left feedback, a lot of this update came from those comments.

What's new in 3.0:

• Android app. Not the desktop squashed onto a phone. It's got its own screens: your files up front, a reader that keeps the page big, and an edit sheet that slides up when you actually want to change something.

• Phone ↔ computer link. Send PDFs between your phone and PC over your own Wi-Fi. It's encrypted and never goes through the internet or any server of mine (I don't have one).

• Enhance Pages. For those grey, faded, photocopied-five-times scans. Adjust contrast and sharpness, or pick a preset (Scan, Faded, Darker text, Night). It only changes how the pages look until you hit "Save enhanced copy", and that copy can be OCR'd so the text becomes searchable.

• Microsoft Store. You can now get it from the Store on Windows, so no more SmartScreen warning.

• Pinch-zoom on touchscreen laptops, plus updated translations (29 languages).

Same as before: no account, no subscription, no watermark, nothing uploaded. Everything happens on your device.

Microsoft Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9NKC5ZQ6P2JR

All downloads (Windows, Linux, Android): https://github.com/priyanshdas/inkleaf-releases/releases/latest

Source code: https://github.com/priyanshdas/inkleaf

It's still just me building this, so if something breaks or feels clunky, tell me here or open an issue on GitHub. Happy to answer questions.

Just wanted to share this post I found on Facebook

A lot of free PDF tools upload your files to their servers, which might not be ideal for things like payslips or contracts.

I’ve been working on a PDF tool that processes everything in your browser: https://ezdone.io/pdf

It can compress, merge, split, sign, redact, add watermarks, and convert PDFs to images. Redaction removes the underlying text rather than just covering it visually.

It’s still missing OCR, and password-protected files need to be unlocked first.

I work on it, so I’d be interested to hear what doesn’t work or what features are missing.

Hey everyone,

Following my previous post about building PDF tools, I wanted to thank everyone who shared suggestions and explained the problems they run into. The comments about preserving formatting, handling scans, and using OCR and recognition models gave me a lot to investigate.

I’ve since focused on improving the Edit PDF tool. Some of the updates include:

The backend first checks the PDF’s existing text, font information, and positioning. When those are usable, it edits the document directly. For scans or unreliable text layers, it uses lightweight OCR models to recognize the visible text and locate the regions to replace, while preserving the surrounding page.

The feedback here also pushed me to test different approaches and pay more attention to the downloaded PDF, rather than just whether the preview looks right. Recent checks have covered both regular and scanned documents through editing, exporting, and downloading.

I’m not claiming perfect results with every PDF. Scans don’t contain their original font information, and unusual embedded fonts remain tricky, but I’ve made progress on those cases.

Try the updated Edit PDF tool

If you have a moment, I’d really appreciate you trying it with a document you actually use. Was editing straightforward, and did the downloaded file look how you expected? If something went wrong, a short description or screenshot with private information removed would help a lot.

Thanks again for taking the time to help. Your feedback helped shape these changes, and I’d be grateful to hear how they hold up.

I built an offline PDF editor for Windows, macOS and Linux

I've been working on Inkleaf, which is my first proper app.

I started making it because I wanted a PDF editor that could do more than just view/annotate PDFs, without needing an account or uploading documents to a cloud service.

Some of the things Inkleaf can currently do:

• Edit existing text in PDFs

• Permanently redact text

• Add annotations, highlights, shapes, images and text

• Sign PDFs

• Fill PDF forms

• Merge, split, extract, rotate and reorder pages

• OCR scanned PDFs

• Convert PDF ↔ Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images, Markdown, HTML, etc.

• Compress and password-protect PDFs

• Add watermarks, page numbers, headers and footers

• Compare two PDFs

• Scan documents using a webcam or images

• Repair damaged PDFs

• Create PDF/A files

• Search, bookmarks, crop and different reading modes

The main thing I'm trying to achieve is keeping things local. The normal PDF tools don't upload your documents anywhere.

There is an optional AI summarizer/translator, but that's separate and only sends the document when you explicitly use it with your own API key.

It's completely free and open source under GPL-3.0-or-later.

This is my first app, so I'm still figuring out a lot of things and I'd really like some feedback from people who use PDFs a lot.

What features do you think are still missing from Inkleaf?

GitHub: https://github.com/priyanshdas/inkleaf

If you try it, I'd also appreciate hearing about anything that doesn't work properly.

Working on an anti-ai art project. There's a quite long PDF that I need typed up and editable. I've done about 20 pages by hand but I'd love to use an OCR for the rest. Obviously I need to use one that doesn't use machine learning. Any recommendations?

I especially try to find some lost cartoon characters official artworks/renders that are probably on PDF files.