Comment by vunderba

21 days 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

28 comments

vunderba

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sieste  21 days 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  21 days ago

    >many nontrivial and creative ways to do pdf processing

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

    • sam_lowry_  21 days 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  21 days 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

  • vunderba  20 days ago

    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.

flexagoon  21 days ago

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

  • greggsy  21 days ago

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

    • flexagoon  21 days 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.

  • mlrtime  21 days ago

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

mdotk  19 days ago

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!

bambax  21 days ago

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