Hi folks!

I’m the creator of BentoPDF. It is an open source PDF toolkit that runs entirely in your browser. Your documents stay private, by design.

BentoPDF started as a small side project, but over time it has grown into something much bigger. With our latest major update, BentoPDF now includes 100+ tools, all running fully client-side.

You can do the basics like merge PDFs(while preserving bookmarks), split documents, extract or delete pages, reorder files, rotate pages, and compress PDFs. Thee are also some advanced tools.

You can edit and annotate PDFs directly in the browser: highlight text, add comments, draw shapes, insert images, fill(including XFA) and create forms, manage bookmarks, generate tables of contents, redact, add headers, footers, watermarks, and page numbers.

BentoPDF also supports an extensive range of file conversions. You can convert Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenOffice, Pages, CSV, RTF, EPUB, MOBI, comic book formats, and many more into PDFs, and also convert PDFs back into Word, Excel, images, Markdown, CSV, JSON, and plain text.

For images, BentoPDF supports a massive variety of formats, including HEIC, WebP, SVG, PSD, JP2, and and aalso other formats such as EPUB, CBR/CBZ. You can convert images to PDFs, extract images from PDFs in their original format, or rasterize PDFs with full DPI control.

There are also organization and optimization tools: OCR, PDF/A conversion, booklet creation, N-up layouts, page division, attachment management, layer (OCG) editing, metadata inspection and editing, repair tools, and advanced compression algorithms that rival commercial solutions.

The latest update also includes AI ready extraction tools to export PDFs to structured JSON, extract tables as CSV/Markdown/JSON, and prepare PDFs for RAG and LLM workflows.

All of this works entirely in the browser, without accounts, uploads, or tracking.

This is my first post here and I hope you like it. Any feedback or feature requests are appreciated. Thank you.

Github Link: https://github.com/alam00000/bentopdf

  • smoker@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    I have been looking for something like this for ages. I could kiss you rn 😘

  • fubarx@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    This looks great!

    Can you use it to overlay text fields and fill them?

    Most of my uses are basic. Like filling out a PDF form that doesn’t have proper form entry fields. These are usually older government or bureaucratic/healthcare/school forms.

    I end up adding text boxes and entering values, or adding an X on top of a checkbox, adding a signature PNG file and scaling it to fit the size. Sometimes I have to add a highlight overlay. Then I save it all as a single flattened PDF file.

    Amazingly, this is hard to do in Acrobat and a lot of apps. I end up using a janky, 10-yo desktop app that is no longer supported.

      • fubarx@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        OK, just tried it with one of those old forms. Added a text field overlay and a signature. Even flattens before saving. Works great. Awesome, thanks!

  • sem@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Love this idea!

    Apologies if you’ve written this elsewhere, but do you have a write up of what inspired this project? Particularly why a selfhosted solution vs. client software?

    My guess is:

    • Compatible on all devices
    • Unified editing experience on all devices
    • ??

    Thanks!

    • alam@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I have a bad habit of never writing blogs haha. I will post one very soon (:

  • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Nice, and thanks for posting here! We have a lot of discussion about projects, and it’s helpful when the creator/developer is around to respond to comments directly 😄

    I saw the update on GitHub about the goal of working on it full time. I also swapped over from StirlingPDF and I’m excited to see where this project goes. Best of luck :)

  • ToxicWaste@lemmy.cafeEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    what is the reason to put that tool into a browser? if i use the thing on my private computer, it increases complexity compared to a local installation (not an issue for many ppl here, but for my grandma surely). if i use it on a corporate environment, wouldn’t more employees use it if it was the default PDF viewer on their managed device?

    what did i miss?

    • alam@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Yes, as arthor mentioned it is supposed to be a self hosted tool. But since it’s client side and just a bunch of static files in the end, I will soon be porting it for all major platforms as an installable using Tauri

      • Gortus@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        That’s excellent news! Is the github page linked above the best place to find out about that as soon as it’s ready?

    • arthor@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      this is meant to be self hosted on a server… in my case its a home server, so my wife and i can access/use this at home and on the road, having the documents synced in one place, which is also self-hosted

  • Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    I had no clue this existed!!! Thanks for sharing.

    Would you say that BentoPDF is an alternative to Adobe Acrobat and/or Bluebeam Revu?

    I use those for my job, but it’d be nice to have a FLOSS alternative as a backup

    • CoopaLoopa@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      From what I’ve seen in BlueBeam, I don’t think most PDF editors are going to include any tools to compete with it. Its in a different category for construction markups.

    • alam@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      It has almost all the features of Acrobat except for the text editing, which i will be adding soon

  • VonReposti@feddit.dkEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    It’s not important but I guess it doesn’t support auth? I’ve only got time to do a quick glance right now so I might have missed something.

    I think a lot of people’s use cases might be to integrate with other tools in their self-host stack like Authentik (could be solved by adding proxy auth if nothing exists natively) and Nextcloud or other filesharing/storing solutions.

    If there aren’t any capabilities like that then it could be food for thought for expansion. Otherwise great job! Right now it’s still an upgrade from various shady PDF tool websites where you still have to download the PDF from your server to upload and process the files.

    • alam@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      auth is out of the scope of this project currently. but yes it will be a good addition which i am thinking to add in future updates

      • Serinus@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        2 months ago

        You can just have things be out of scope. It’s really okay!

        Thanks for the work you’ve put into this.

  • rotkehlchen@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Thank you so much. Why did you start this project, which certainly involves a lot of work? ( aka why are you so cool?)

    • alam@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Thank you! It started off as a simple tool as I wanted to merge PDFs visually by applying page ranges and I couldn’t find any offline tool for that. I happened to then post it on reddit, and people asked me to open source it. After which I kept adding features on request and here we are 😂

  • cron@feddit.orgEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Is there a function to create a booklet or brochure?

    This was a very useful feature to print a number of pages and have them in an easy format to read.

    However, at least my Ubuntu print driver doesn’t have this feature, and I would need an extra tool to achive this goal.