Show HN: IPA, a GUI for exploring inner details of PDFs

This is cool!<p>Here are some other similar(?) tools, for seeing the inner contents of a PDF file (the raw objects etc), but I haven&#x27;t compared them to this tool here:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pdf.hyzyla.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pdf.hyzyla.dev&#x2F;</a><p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;itext&#x2F;i7j-rups">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;itext&#x2F;i7j-rups</a> (java -jar ~&#x2F;Downloads&#x2F;itext-rups-7.2.5.jar)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;desgeeko&#x2F;pdfsyntax">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;desgeeko&#x2F;pdfsyntax</a> (python3 -m pdfsyntax inspect foo.pdf &gt; output.html)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;trailofbits&#x2F;polyfile">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;trailofbits&#x2F;polyfile</a> (polyfile --html output.html foo.pdf)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reportmill.com&#x2F;snaptea&#x2F;PDFViewer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reportmill.com&#x2F;snaptea&#x2F;PDFViewer&#x2F;</a> = <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reportmill.com&#x2F;snaptea&#x2F;PDFViewer&#x2F;pviewer.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reportmill.com&#x2F;snaptea&#x2F;PDFViewer&#x2F;pviewer.html</a> (drag PDF onto it)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourceforge.net&#x2F;projects&#x2F;pdfinspector&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourceforge.net&#x2F;projects&#x2F;pdfinspector&#x2F;</a> (an &quot;example&quot; of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;superficial.sourceforge.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;superficial.sourceforge.net&#x2F;</a>)<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.o2sol.com&#x2F;pdfxplorer&#x2F;overview.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.o2sol.com&#x2F;pdfxplorer&#x2F;overview.htm</a><p>More?

For exploring the inners of a PDF you also have RUPS[1] which is open source and easily installed in Linux through flathub[2].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itextpdf.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;rups" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;itextpdf.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;rups</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flathub.org&#x2F;apps&#x2F;com.itextpdf.RUPS" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flathub.org&#x2F;apps&#x2F;com.itextpdf.RUPS</a>

Great work! I&#x27;m sorry to be another jerk posting a link to something similar, but here is my solution, running in the browser (just drag and drop your PDF in):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reportmill.com&#x2F;snaptea&#x2F;PDFViewer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reportmill.com&#x2F;snaptea&#x2F;PDFViewer&#x2F;</a>

This looks nice, and I didn&#x27;t know about eGUI which looks like it runs on the web. Very interesting.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.egui.rs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.egui.rs&#x2F;</a>

Back at zynamics, we used to sell PDF Dissector:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20110902114238&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zynamics.com&#x2F;dissector.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20110902114238&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zynami...</a><p>We never got around to open sourcing it, so I&#x27;m happy to see that there is work being done in this space.<p>Congrats to seekbytes for releasing this!

Is there actually a open source good alternative of Adobe Acrobat? I mean one where you can easily 1) merge and extract pages 2) edit content, e.g. change a single line in a simple vector graphics, add text ornother elements 3) place a signature and create a &quot;protected&quot; pdf. AFAIK, there isn&#x27;t a single good open source program to do all of these things. Why?

Does anyone have any recommendations for a good tool that allows both programmatic inspection and modification of PDF primitives. For example, let&#x27;s say someone wants to iterate through every embedded image in a PDF and apply some form of signal processing to the images in-place, then re-save the PDF?

I was curious to try this out as it might actually solve a minor problem of mine right now, but it crashed as soon as I tried to open a PDF.<p>Installed from git using cargo 1.80.1 on Ubuntu 22.04 on an AMD Framework laptop if that&#x27;s of any help.

I recently wanted to edit out a huge background image repeating on almost every page of a PDF and found out there&#x27;s no obvious way to do it.<p>Would appreciate any tool suggestions!

Since this mentions malware, is this tool safe to use to open it? Or do you still need to use other protection methods?

what&#x27;s a good tool to check if a pdf is not tampered with eg. as a tool to check before loading a pdf from a public bucket to your backend application?