1b:I[3821,["874","static/chunks/874-5853b36c417a5f43.js","598","static/chunks/598-8e8b350c69b61725.js","735","static/chunks/735-5d5145bb0f79dc16.js","881","static/chunks/881-64080935572a77c4.js","671","static/chunks/app/%5Blocale%5D/submitted/page-9972e6b84e2d7c4f.js"],"default"] 1c:T728,Here's a neat hack I made recently to do basic PDF editing directly in a browser—without having to upload anything to a server.

I was initially looking for a way to do simple PDF modification (extracting pages, merging, and adding page numbers). There are some good server-side tools for this (QPDF, PDFTk, PDFBox, iText, Hummus), but for better speed and privacy I really wanted a 100% client-side solution.

There are a few good JavaScript PDF libraries for reading and displaying PDFs (pdf.js) and creating PDFs from scratch (jsPDF, PDFKit), but I couldn't find any for editing existing PDFs. So, I did what any self-respecting hacker would do, and rolled my own. :-)

Actually, I found out that Mozilla's pdf.js solved half the problem, as it does an excellent job disassembling PDF files. So all I had to do was figure out a way to put them back together again.

The result is PDF Assembler, now available on GitHub and NPM. I also put together a demonstration site (https://www.pdfcircus.com) which shows some examples of what it can do. I know PDF Assembler still needs some tweaking, but I think the basic idea is sound, and so far I've been pretty happy with how it works.

Please take a look and let me know what you think.

Thanks!

PDF Assembler Links:

Demonstration Site - https://www.pdfcircus.com

GitHub - https://github.com/DevelopingMagic/pdfassembler

NPM -

Submissions by dschnelldavis

Show HN: PDF Assembler – client-side PDF editing

Show HN: PDF Assembler – client-side PDF editing