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Seems like Clientside PDF editors are the new "hello world" app these days. From the last couple months on Show HN alone:
Show HN: PDF Quick – Free PDF tools with 100% client-side processing
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46094734
Show HN: A privacy-first, client-side toolbox (PDF, Imgs, Dev) no server uploads
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46018221
Show HN: FileZen – Client-side PDF and Video tools using WebAssembly
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46339833
Show HN: JW Tool Box – Free, privacy-first web tools (PDF, Image, Converters)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46065448
Show HN: PDFClear – Browser-based PDF tools with local AI (WASM+Transformers.js)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46036944
Show HN: Free PDF tools that run in the browser
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46315672
Show HN: Client-side file tools – PDF, images, crypto, all in-browser
Due to pdf popularity there is a lot of demand for pdf processing tools. And the format is so complex that there are many nontrivial and creative ways to do pdf processing. That's why these "Hello World" projects usually make Top 5 on HN, and one of the upvotes is usually from me.
By forgotpwd16 2026-01-198:271 reply >many nontrivial and creative ways to do pdf processing
They're all wrapping PDFlib and provide the same functionality.
By sam_lowry_ 2026-01-198:523 reply I am already well served by ghostscript, GIMP, Imagemagick, etc:
Optimize PDF:
Merge PDF:#!/bin/bash INPUT="$1" OUTPUT="$(mktemp --suffix=.pdf)" gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \ -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile="$OUTPUT" "$INPUT" mv "$OUTPUT" "$INPUT"
And so on and so forth.#!/bin/sh gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \ -dCompatibilityLevel=1.3 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \ -sOutputFile=merged.pdf "$@"Moreover, I see a webapp and I immediately assume everything I do in this app is exfiltrated and abused.
I can check that the webapp advertised above is indeed local-first, but I can't be 100% sure they don't steal my data in a way I did not foresee, e.g. via websockets or cookies.
Because I learnt this the hard way by being on Instagram and Gmail.
To better compress my personal preference is
pdftops -paper A4 -expand -level3 file.pdf # I'm from EU, so A4 is my common paper format ps2pdf14 -dEmbedAllFonts=true \ -dUseFlateCompression=true \ -dOptimize=true \ -dProcessColorModel=/DeviceRGB \ -r72 \ -dDownsampleGrayImages=true \ -dGrayImageResolution=150 \ -dAutoFilterGrayImages=false \ -dGrayImageDownsampleType=/Bicubic \ -dDownsampleMonoImages=true \ -dMonoImageResolution=150 \ -dMonoImageDownsampleType=/Subsample \ -dDownsampleColorImages=true \ -dColorImageResolution=150 \ -dAutoFilterColorImages=false \ -dColorImageDownsampleType=/Bicubic \ -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \ -dNOSAFER \ -dALLOWPSTRANSPARENCY \ -dShowAnnots=false \ file.ps compressed.pdfBy sam_lowry_ 2026-01-1910:41 If you do `-dEmbedAllFonts=true` then probably `-dSubsetFonts=true` would also be useful.
And for the rest, `-dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook` should already have most of the values that you set explicitely.
Your commands to process PDF with Ghostscript are lossy (they lose lots of metadata and in minor ways they also change how the PDF renders), and they produce very large PDF files.
By x3ro 2026-01-199:09 Can you expand on why the produced PDF files are supposed to be larger than the originals? I've not observed that yet.
You're being downvoted because not everyone has CLI access to a server and the required ghostscript binaries etc.
Realistically, most 'normal users' have PDF needs like these links and we as tech people can safely give these sites to non-technical people and have confidence their data isn't being stolen on remote dodgy servers (think gas / electricity bills, invoices, bank statements etc which is a PII gold pot).
By sam_lowry_ 2026-01-1910:38 Server? what server? Ghostscript is available in virtually any Linux distro, on Mac with and without brew and even on Windows.
I have no confidence in any website, especially the one that claims to be local-only but can technically change on a whim of the developer once it starts getting enough traffic from users.
OTOH, I trust 30+ years old software sitting on on my hard drive not to phone home on every keystroke.
During my college days, I used iLovePDF a lot, so I wanted to build an alternative to it. It’s not just about PDFs - I also have work in progress around image processing and related tools and Chrome Extetion as well
By vunderba 2026-01-1916:53 Sure, but if you just wanted a 100% client-side PDF tool, there are dozens of them in existence already.
You can do as you like, but I don't think this is a particularly good use of your time, even with AI doing the majority of the heavy lifting.
I guess what I'm saying is that "Swiss army knife multitool" apps are one of the lowest hanging LLM fruits, so don't be too surprised when you find that the tree has been stripped clean.
Half of them also have a very obviously vibecoded front-end that looks exactly the same
They’re created to offer functional outcomes. If they’re doing so in a friendly interface then I’m cool with that
By flexagoon 2026-01-198:24 Sure, if they're tested well enough that there are no obvious UX issues (which is usually not the case)
It's just that there's zero effort put into them so they don't really offer anything of value. If you write a todo list-tier app, it would be completely useless to most people, but it's a learning project for you. If you vibecoded a todo list-tier app, it's completely useless to most people including yourself.
By mlrtime 2026-01-1910:45 /r/selfhosted just added a new rule, vibe coded apps only on Friday because there were just too many.
So if a platform is vibe-coded, it suddenly has no value? When the Spotify founder vibe-codes an app, it’s praised—but when an open-source contributor like me does it, it’s seen as a bad thing? That doesn’t seem fair
> When the Spotify founder vibe-codes an app, it’s praised
Not sure which app you're talking about
He vibecoded a web viewer for an open file format as a one time project for personal use. It's not even a public project. Not sure how it's relevant.
That being said, Shopify CEO has the worst AI takes ever so he's probably the last person you should take as your role model.
By pratik227 2026-01-217:05 I don’t have a role model, bro, and I don’t need to justify anything to you. You’re not that important-so yeah, go ahead and make some contribution to the world, not here
By mdotk 2026-01-211:01 You're right, the market is flooded with simple "button grid" apps. That saturation is actually why I built FlowPDF.
I didn't want another list of basic tools; I wanted to chain them. I built a node-based editor so you can create actual pipelines (Merge -> OCR -> Filter -> Compress) rather than just doing one-off tasks.
I think that's the only way to actually add value over the 50 other "Hello World" clones.
https://www.flowpdf.app/ if you wanna check it out!
By forgotpwd16 2026-01-198:25 Not even couple of months. Just within last month.
All with similar design, similar implementation, similar HN post. Literally AI slop.
Also:
Show HN: BentoPDF is a privacy first PDF Toolkit
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46657892 (this one just yesterday)
Show HN: NoUploadTools – Free Tools that don't upload your files
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46516400
Show HN: TechRex – client-side PDF editor (no upload, no watermark)
By bambax 2026-01-199:57 Also, PdfTk has existed for decades and is very solid (but Windows only, I think).
By lukaslukas 2026-01-197:461 reply Good point! I don't understand why this link received so many points.
By jacquesm 2026-01-197:50
Was this done heavily LLM assisted? Especially the PDF Edit tools have user-interaction quirks and bugs that a human developer would catch immediately during the regular manual testing when developing.
I'd suggest you at least try and mitigate that by having the LLM do extensive e2e testing if you aren't interested in using your own product.
By PinguTS 2026-01-198:55 Yeah, and I have the feeling it is not tested at all.
It offers Word -> PDF conversion. Just for interest I tried it and it doesn't even get the simplest page right. It puts the filename into an header. The test page had 4 images, one svg, one pdf (from svg), and another variation of the first 2. The generated PDF only contains 2 of those images with wrong sizes. The later two are missing. So it's basically completely useless.
The free of charge LibreOffice gives much better results with its own caveats.
It’s still a work in progress. I used an LLM to speed up development, and I’ve done the testing, but I’ll keep improving it no doubt
I don't even care about that. My suggestion to him was earnest. I don't have a problem with LLMs. Just with how people use them. I just don't like "slop". I see the same user-interaction problems every time.
I just don't want people to litter their heavily polished immaculately styled products that have so clearly bad user-interaction design. E2e testing and closing the loop on LLMs does seem to help here.
Though I really would prefer people click around their own product for at least 5 minutes.
It matters to me. Depending on the ratio there is a line between 'LLM assisted' and 'LLM derived'. There are enough samples of open source code around this theme out there that this could be one of either and the goal to commercialize it is a messy one if the provenance of the code isn't clear. It would be great to see this sort of thing litigated so that there is at least some clarity rather than just a moral stance.
So Claude Workspace is also written using the Claude LLM—does that mean you would stop using the product?
By pwatsonwailes 2026-01-198:53 None of it is them, all of it is LLMs.
How does it fare with PDFs consisting entirely of images? Any PDF tool was struggling with compressing a passport scan (made with iPhone so might've contributed somehow, knowing Apple and PDFs) I had to cut down in size. Ended up using ImageMagick cause any Ghostscript based tool couldn't get it below 7 MBs from the original 28MB which, although, pretty good, was still too high and I could tell there was still plenty of detail that could be discarded without losing the eligibility of the document. I had to compress it with ImageMagick at the end, cut it down from 28MB to 3MB.
Also does Adobe have some kind of patent/copyright on PDF forms? I don't think I saw any free tools that can edit fillable fields / tables in PDFs. I don't see any mention of forms in the Suite section of your app either. Is it just stupidly difficult / annoying to implement ?
By pratik227 2026-01-198:47 Good questions.
Image-only PDFs (scans): These are the hardest case. If a PDF is basically high-res images (like iPhone scans), browser-based tools have limits compared to ImageMagick, which has much finer control over resampling and JPEG compression. Ghostscript-style pipelines help, but ImageMagick often wins if you’re willing to discard more detail. Improving this is on the roadmap, but it’s genuinely tough in-browser.
PDF forms: Adobe doesn’t own forms, but editable PDF forms are extremely complex and poorly standardized. Many free tools avoid true form editing because it’s easy to break files. That’s why I haven’t enabled it yet—possible, just time-consuming and error-prone.
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