Comment by vunderba

8 hours ago

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=46209627

22 comments

vunderba

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sieste  7 hours ago

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.

  • forgotpwd16  7 hours ago

    >many nontrivial and creative ways to do pdf processing

    They're all wrapping PDFlib and provide the same functionality.

    • sam_lowry_  6 hours ago

      I am already well served by ghostscript, GIMP, Imagemagick, etc:

      Optimize 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"

      Merge PDF:

          #!/bin/sh
    gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
      -dCompatibilityLevel=1.3 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \
      -sOutputFile=merged.pdf "$@"

      And so on and so forth.

      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.

      6 replies →

pratik227  8 hours ago

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

flexagoon  7 hours ago

Half of them also have a very obviously vibecoded front-end that looks exactly the same

  • mlrtime  4 hours ago

    /r/selfhosted just added a new rule, vibe coded apps only on Friday because there were just too many.

  • greggsy  7 hours ago

    They’re created to offer functional outcomes. If they’re doing so in a friendly interface then I’m cool with that

    • flexagoon  7 hours ago

      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.

  • pratik227  6 hours ago

    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

bambax  5 hours ago

Also, PdfTk has existed for decades and is very solid (but Windows only, I think).