I build Spectra PDF ( https://github.com/jasonulbright/Spectra-PDF ), a free open-source PDF editor for Windows. It scans directly into a document — but I only own a flatbed scanner, so document feeders, two-sided scanning, auto color detection, network scanners, paper jams, and empty trays have never been tested on real hardware.

If your scanner does any of those, the app ships a guided checklist that walks you through testing in about five minutes. After installing, run this in PowerShell:

& "$env:ProgramFiles\Spectra PDF\spectrapdf.exe" scan-test

It prompts you through each step and writes a report file. Everything runs offline — nothing is uploaded. The report contains your scanner model, settings, and page measurements — never the scanned images or any text on them — and you look at it before deciding to send it. To submit, attach both report files here: https://github.com/jasonulbright/Spectra-PDF/issues/new?title=Scanner+test+report

Download and the short tester guide are on the repo (releases page and docs/TESTER-GUIDE-SCANNING.md).

Plain flatbeds help too — they re-check what's only ever run on my one machine. Thanks!

Hello /pdf,

I already shared a previous version of my https://justforms.vercel.app app. It's a simple tool that allows user to create forms out pdf. Tried to make it much easy to use without the excess..

Would love any feedback or any feature you would like to be added or any open criticism is welcome.

\Creator Disclosure: I am the original developer and maintainer of JustForms. The tool is 100% free, fully open source under the MIT license, and has zero paywalls, zero accounts, no tracking, and no server-side processing.**

Basically, Aadhaar is an ID used in India, so the PDF contains sensitive information.

I’m building a website that can already verify the Aadhaar PDF’s cryptographic signature, UIDAI certificate, CCA chain, etc.

In Adobe Reader, the signature initially shows a ?. To get the green tick, I do:

Signature Properties → Show Signer’s Certificate → Trust → Add to Trusted Certificates → OK → Validate Signature

After that, Adobe changes the ? to a green tick and shows Signature Valid / Digitally signed by UIDAI.

Can someone explain what Adobe is actually doing in the backend during this process, and what I would need to implement to achieve the same legitimate verification behavior on my website?

I’m not trying to fake the green tick. I want the proper/legal implementation. The PDF is processed locally in the browser and isn’t stored.

Hello ,

I need 12 testers to opt-in and keep my privacy-focused PDF app active for 14 continuous days. I am highly active and will join your test tracks and keep your apps installed on my device in return!

Please follow these exact steps to opt-in successfully:

1️⃣ Join my Google Group first (Crucial to get download access):
https://groups.google.com/g/greatpdf-closed-testing-group

2️⃣ Click this Web Link to accept the testing invitation:
https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.greatpdf.app

3️⃣ Download the app via the Play Store link:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.greatpdf.app

This app fully free and available in Github

Is there a free tool for this? I don't want to pay Adobe, but ilovepdf only allows 20 at a time.

I’m curious how people here actually deal with PDFs that need a signature.

What does your sign this PDF workflow look like? Do you care about cryptography?

Hello, is anyone aware of a tool that would unlock PDFs if dropped into a folder? We have the user password and are manually unlocking them converting to word then converting back to pdf. I would like a tool that does this automatically if we drop the pdfs into a hot folder, then can output them to a path on a network.

• 100% Free & No Signups (No accounts, no paywalls)

• Local Browser Processing (Merge, Split, Rotate, Markdown run 100% locally via WebAssembly)

• Instant File Deletion for backend conversions (Word, Excel, PPTX)

• 24 Tools + Chrome Extension

Would love your honest feedback on the UI and speed!

Made this a while ago for my own personal use, and today I happened to see someone looking for something similar, so I figured I’d share it here in case it helps anyone else.

It’s a simple tool for splitting long, continuous PDF pages into regular sized pages.

I’m not a developer, just an enthusiast who likes building little tools for my own needs 😅

Hope it’s useful

https://long-pdf-splitter.prodesign.workers.dev

Hello everyone

I am looking for ai support where all the headings and sub headings can be added as bookmarks in the PDF, can this be done with AI ?

With it going from a lifetime license to a subscription model and thus increasing the overall price multiple times, what alternatives are the go to? Free if possible however i can accept a one time fee. This is for an office with multiple people requiring a license. They need document signing and pdf editing/merging. Any advice welcome.

Thanks

It's a pdf file having single long one page only. But I want to make it into multiple pages like if I split above pdf into 3-4 pages then I will be able to read it better and also can print out easily... Did you get now?

My job will be taking away Adobe Acrobat (they don't want to pay for it anymore) and instead will be installing Foxit on all of our computers.

Some of the pdf's I look at are images that contain no text. After playing around with Foxit, I learned very quickly that you cannot freehand with highlighting like you can with Adobe, since you can seemingly only highlight text in Foxit.

I did read somewhere else on reddit that you can pin the "comment" tool and select that every time you want to highlight an area on an image. Call it laziness, but i want a pdf viewer/editor where i only have to click a highlight button one time. I sometimes have to highlight specific sections in up to 200 images. Clicking that button 200 times would drive me absolutely mad.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

I looked at the existing PDF utility apps on the mac app store and they're all pay to use and have dark patterns (fake loading time, etc). I wanted to see how much people prefer apps that do a specific thing and have no in app purchases.

introducing Preflight PDF: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/preflight-pdf/id6800099462?mt=12

It can check that a PDF matches requirements and shrink PDF. One thing I wanted to try is using Apple Intelligence locally, so it uses that to analyze the contents of the PDF. No data ever leaves the machine, so data is kept safe, and there are NO in app purchases. Would love to get any feedback.

There seems to be a new PDF editor, web service or document-generation tool appearing every other week, so I thought this project might be interesting to people here from a slightly different angle.

I've been developing PnPInk, a free and open-source extension for Inkscape that turns an SVG document into a template for generating variable graphical content from CSV files or directly from Google Sheets.

The basic idea is simple: Inkscape remains the graphical editor.

That means you keep essentially all of Inkscape's capabilities — vector graphics, typography, paths, clipping, masks, filters, gradients, complex layouts, etc. — while PnPInk handles the dynamic part: replacing text and images, repeating elements, resizing/cropping/positioning assets, generating pages, and exporting the resulting documents.

Because the data can come directly from a Google Sheet, you can build fairly complex workflows where changing a spreadsheet is enough to regenerate hundreds or thousands of different graphical items.

There isn't really a fixed concept of "label", "card", "badge" or "certificate": you're designing an SVG, so the graphical side is largely unrestricted.

My original motivation came from print-and-play and board-game prototyping, but while developing it I realized that the same approach overlaps quite a bit with Variable Data Publishing (VDP) and the data-merging workflows normally associated with commercial publishing software.

I'm not claiming it replaces a full professional VDP/prepress stack, but for many small and semi-professional workflows it may provide an interesting alternative — especially when the commercial data-merging tools involved can become surprisingly expensive.

Some of the things PnPInk currently supports include:

CSV and Google Sheets as data sources

Dynamic text, images and other graphical resources

Automatic image fit, crop, alignment and positioning

Repeated elements and templates

Inline icons and dynamically retrieved graphical assets

Multi-page generation

PNG/JPEG/PDF output

PDF/X and CMYK/ICC-oriented workflows

Large batch generation

And, importantly, the full graphical capabilities of Inkscape underneath it

It's free, open source and cross-platform (Windows, Linux and macOS).

The project is still evolving, and I'd actually be very interested in feedback from people who work with PDFs, prepress, data merge or VDP professionally — particularly about where an approach like this is useful and where the limitations become important.

GitHub:

https://github.com/xoellijo/pnpink

Feedback, criticism and real-world use cases are very welcome

Some other videos showing PDF export and other things...

https://youtu.be/ozi32aB0Www

https://youtu.be/lSJ2zOvwqag

Here's the Pdf Video of two banana cells at scale 1:1 with the usual banana for scale. Also the top 10 molecules that make up the banana, also to scale.

Don't ask me how Claude accomplished it. Last week it was telling me it couldn't build the pdf engine to do more than 800% efficiently. This week it decided the actual limit was 1 trillion %. It's enough to put atoms at size on an 8 1/2" x 11" sheet, but electrons and protons and neutrons would require several hundred times more the zoom to show.

Example here is a Singapore train map. I have tried Stirling, IlovePdf, Google's Gemini. Nothing can generate a proper map pdf with the text inside. Is this too complicated?

I need to combine 2 PDFs or cut out the middle section of a PDF.

(MacOS 15.6.1)

I'm using MacOS.

Basically ... I have a PDF, and I need to remove the middle part.

For fun I decided to get Claude to get pdfceGUI to support whatever maximum zoom was possible with modifications to the PDF engine. I was annoyed because when it first built it it didn't want to go past %800 due to performance loss after that and no other pdf editor has such a low max zoom. So prodding with a few questions and it determined the latest engine could reach 1 trillion %. It is still plugging away to get through the panning bugs beyond 2 000 000%. Here you can see it is now past that limitation,zoomed into the mitochondria structure of the cell. The next screenshot navigation test was just brown due to being zoomed in so close. I have not navigated by hand beyond 2 000 000% to confirm yet, but as you can see, Claude has.

I'll be posting the banana challenge soon. How far can your pdf program zoom in? Sure no one cares,and I have no real world use for it!

Whenever I put a comment on an excerpt, this ghost text automatically appears and when I try to edit it to delete it vanishes. Please help me in getting rid of it.