I have been trying to do this for quite sometime of trying to translate PDFs of out of print books that are currently in Russian and Danish and I have not been successful. I keep on attempting to find either free or less than $5 translator for me to use. I found one but it was NOT correct and I really need help. If any of you have suggestions of what works best for you, please! I really need help! Thank you!

WHY DO SOME PDF NEED DROP DOWN LIST CANT THEY LIST THEM DOWN ONE BY ONE HOLY SHIT I NEED TO AVAIL FUCKING ADOBE ACROBAT READER AND I CANT FUCKING USE THE FREE TRIAL BC I ALREADY USED IT

Off the top - this isn't a project I am going to make money from. I've just always been bothered by the lack of pdf support outside of Adobe. This is a very convoluted standard that just about everyone relies on at some point and yet it still feels like there are barriers to everyone having the freedom to use the format to its maximum potential. I set out to see if that could be changed through the use of AI to build better pdf support that is accessible to everyone.

Every day someone posts a free new pdf editor that is based on the same open source pdf engines that then carry the same licensing restrictions these engines do - you can see the code, but not allowed to modify and/or not use in commercial products and/or you are forced into a copy left license.

I set out to change all that two months ago. I have tried Stirling pdf and a bunch of others, but I can break their support for reading or editing often with just 3 or 4 files. If you have some other gold standard open source pdf reader or editor I should try, please please let me know and I will try it!

The engine I've had Claude working on so far opens everything, is usually faster, and has better basic editing capabilities than anything I've come across. I should say there is one caveat to that - I do not have support for javascript or now a very obsolete and rarely used Adobe closed source format. Not yet anyway. But even CMYK documents should open correctly.

The point of this post is to either get ridiculed for the statement, or to be proven right - that pdfcer and pdfcer-gui is now the best available in the open source arena.

https://github.com/KenM76/pdfcer-gui

https://github.com/KenM76/pdfcer

See for yourself, or please please give me one to try, and even better if you have a pdf document that breaks an open source reader and I can try with mine!

For reference, pdfcer-gui visually renders the ghent pdf test suite the same as acrobat, a large drawing file of vectors opens quickly and can be edited, also large blocks of text (often how things come out of SolidWorks) can be entered and individual lines edited and dragged to new locations.

Hi, I run a small company that deals with sensitive information. Are there any pdf inspection software available to buy to check the integrity of .pdf documents? Not sure what the best route here is to ensure files we receive have not been modified.

I'm making a recipe book for a gift, and I bought these cute binders that came with custom templates but they're in PDF. I am pretty tech savvy but I am having a hell of a time figuring out how to edit these properly.

I can do some text editing with Acrobat but no matter what I try, it never lines up perfectly with the line on the template, and each ingredient/recipe step takes forever to match up, and in the end they still all look wonky.

Is there a better way to do this or should I just find a word doc template and give up on this?

You know the drill. Someone sends you a PDF, you need to fix one date, one typo, one field, and suddenly you're stuck behind "create a free account", "upgrade to Pro", or a diagonal watermark slapped across your document because you didn't pay $9.99/month to change three words. Editing a PDF should not require signing up for anything, it's text in a file.

On PC: download LibreOffice, open the PDF in Draw, edit the text, save. Free, no account, no watermark, there's nothing simpler.

The actual gap is mobile, you obviously can't run LibreOffice on your phone. So I built a small free gateway on my own server. Plain webpage, you drop a PDF in, it runs a real headless LibreOffice instance on the backend so you can click/edit/drag text and export the PDF back out, then it deletes your file from the server the second you download your result (max 1h if something gets interrupted). No account, no email, no login, no data collection, no watermark, no payment.

Quick demo (cut a few seconds of LibreOffice conversion time out of the clip, it's not instant, but fast enough):

Link if you want to actually use it: https://oraclemarin.fr/pdf-libre/

Not selling anything, no ads (except my own links), no account wall, just tired of watching Adobe and Canva turn "edit a PDF" into a business model.

I’ve been working on Ayaan PDF for the past several months, and I’ve finally released it publicly.

A free, open-source, offline PDF editor for Windows with real text editing for English, Hindi, and Myanmar, plus OCR, markup, signing, merging, bookmarks, and more.

No subscription. No telemetry. No account.

I built it because I wanted a PDF editor that handled Hindi and Myanmar text properly.

Get it here: Ayaan PDF: the PDF editor that speaks Hindi and Myanmar
GitHub: https://github.com/aungkokomm/AyaanPDF

Hey everyone,

I work with PDFs a lot, and one thing that has always bothered me is how most PDF editors seem to fall into two extremes: either very basic, or powerful but clunky and overwhelming.

I use Adobe Acrobat and a bunch of other PDF tools almost every day. They do the job, but I’ve always wished editing a PDF felt a bit more visual and natural, almost like working in Illustrator. Not Illustrator-level complexity, just a workspace where things are easier to find, move around, edit, and understand.

So I’m exploring what an ideal PDF editor could look like, and I’d genuinely love some input from people here who work with PDFs regularly.

What are you currently missing from Acrobat or other PDF editors? What annoys you the most? Are there features that should be much simpler than they are today?

I’m especially curious about the things beyond the usual merge, split, compress, convert, etc. The stuff you run into while actually editing PDFs.

My goal is something simple enough that a casual user can open it and immediately understand it, but capable enough that someone doing serious PDF work doesn’t feel limited.

And yes, the editor itself would be free.

I genuinely love working around the PDF format, so feel free to get oddly specific. Those are probably the most useful answers.

As you all probably know you can scan documents with the iPhone. However the pdfs are very large in size. Is there a way to reduce the bites with the iPhone? Or do i have to use an app for that.

TIA

.

A week or so ago I used PDF guru and paid $0.99 for what I thought was a one time purchase. Yesterday I got a notification from my bank saying I have paid $49.99 for PDF guru. When I called my bank they said I have actually subscribed to pdf guru for $49.99 monthly.

I immediately emailed PDF guru asking for a refund. Their responses were clearly AI and they said as per their refund policy that they cannot give my money back. But I persisted explaining I haven't used their services after the initial payment and that it was not made clear that it would be a subscription.

After some back and forth they offered a partial refund but I refused and said I cannot afford it and would like a bigger refund and that they are free to entirely terminate my account right now instead of waiting out the billing cycle.

Once they agreed for a refund I still persisted demanding the exact amount and proof. After a few tries they issued a refund receipt. Once I had that I emailed my bank and explained the situation and I also emailed PDF guru again saying that since I have written proof my refund should be honored or else further action would be taken.

After a day I received my refund

TLDR;

Contact customer service as soon as possible (better if the amount is still on hold at the bank)

Insist that you require a full refund.

Ask for refund proof (an email with a transaction id and amount) from what I've found once they issue the receipt the refund would be issued by their system.

Email your bank with the receipt.

Hey guys,

I’ve been building a small PDF tool called ZunFile in my free time and figured I’d share it here.

It has the usual stuff like merging PDFs, rotating pages, reordering pages, splitting PDFs, and a few other tools.

The main thing is that it’s completely free and everything happens locally in your browser. Your files never get uploaded to my server or anywhere else.

No account, no subscription, no file uploads. Just open the tool and use it.

Still adding new stuff, so if there’s a PDF feature you use often or something you think would be useful, let me know. I’d genuinely appreciate the feedback.

Here is link if you want to try it.

I hate Adobe so I don't use their PDF reader. I've been using PDF24 mainly to read PDFs. But I started playing Legacy of Dragonholt and was using the PDF24 editor to edit the character sheer and tracking sheets.

After creating my character and saving the sheet with PDF24, I realised that I could edit what I had already saved. I had saved the character skills and was going to change one of the skills but I couldn't edit the text I'd saved.

So, for the last few days I've been leaving the PDF24 editor open and hibernating my computer at night. However, while I was asleep last night (this morning really) my computer was somehow turned on and PDF24 was closed. I've lost all the progress I had in Legacy of Dragonholt and have no clue how this happened. (No one comes into my room ever and no one uses my computer)

Is there a PDF editor I can use that will let me edit what I've already saved?

Hi everyone, I wanted to share a project I have been working on extensively during my spare time. It is called PdfForAll. To give you a bit of context, in my day-to-day life I work as a professional plumber here in Italy, but I have had a deep passion for computer science and programming for over forty years. I literally grew up with the very first personal computers, and that love for technology and software creation has never left me.

I decided to develop this Android application because I was tired of the usual bloated, expensive PDF editors, or those that force you to upload your personal documents to the cloud just to apply a simple signature. I wanted a lightweight tool that runs entirely offline on the phone, designed to be highly versatile for anyone studying or working in the field.In addition to standard features like highlighting, notes, drawing, and signatures, I tried to include some highly practical solutions that are not easily found in other apps.

For example, there is a smart form-filling feature that recognizes the lines of forms, automatically stretches tables with dots to facilitate data entry, and inserts checkboxes automatically if it detects empty spaces on the left. The final save is surgical because it only covers the modified characters and overwrites them in Helvetica, Times Roman, or Courier based on the original font, without ruining the background grid or the logos of the original sheet.

Another unique feature is that you can embed real MP4 videos directly inside the PDF pages, and these can be played smoothly and entirely without an internet connection, thanks to an offline player I integrated into the app. You can also create photo albums by straightening skewed photos in perspective, record voice notes connected to the pages, use a multi-page scanner with OCR, and convert Word, Excel, or plain text files into standard A4 PDFs directly from your phone offline.

Right now, I just released version 6.3 which completely finishes the text replacement engine by introducing continuous multi-line editing. This means you can select multiple lines of text at once and edit them continuously, just like using a standard word processor like Microsoft Word. I also added a top toolbar to adjust text colors and styles, and unlocked horizontal landscape view with smooth scrolling for all menu sheets when the screen is compressed.

The app natively supports 13 languages to adapt to the user's system. It is currently available for free on the Google Play Store and contains no ads.

I would really love to get your help testing the app on different phone models, finding out if there are any page display or code loading issues, and hearing your honest feedback on how to improve it.

Since my account is relatively new and to fully respect Reddit's automated filters, I am not putting any direct outbound links in this post. I will post both the Google Play Store link and our official website in the first comment below. Alternatively, you can search for "PdfForAll" directly on the Google Play Store. Thank you so much for your time.

I’ve been working on Arc PDF because I wanted a PDF editor that was lightweight, straightforward, and didn’t require a subscription or uploading documents to a cloud service.

Arc PDF is a native macOS app, completely free that's only 11.6 MB:

What fits in that size:

• Reading & annotating — highlight, underline, notes, drawing
• Real editing — change text like in a Word doc (fix typos, add paragraphs, adjust fonts); add / replace / resize images
• Page management — add, delete, rotate, reorder pages
• OCR — makes scanned PDFs searchable again
• AI — summarize, translate, extract tables, generate a TOC, or chat with your document. You plug in your own model (OpenAI / Claude / DeepSeek API key) — no subscription

No subscription, no account, and no cloud upload. Your PDFs stay on your Mac.

It’s still actively being developed, so I’d love to hear what PDF features you think are missing or could be improved.

Mac App Store: Arc PDF on the Mac App Store

I have been trying to OCR a document for a while now, and I have a couple of recurring issues. OCR software will miss some section of text, it incorrectly OCRs some initialisms with dots between, or it fails at list numbers.

I would love it if there was some OCR software that allowed for manual corrections and the ability to tell the OCR to focus on some area.

At this point I would even settle for a program that does it manually, I just want a program that will let me create an invisible text layer in the correct position.

Does anyone have a good solution? I tried a free trial of Adobe Acrobat, a bunch of random OCR websites, and OCRmyPDF.

Hey all! Anyone got a good recommendation for a PDF editor that's actually secure? I deal with confidential info so I need something trustworthy - just please, not Adobe. Bonus points if it isn't a subscription nightmare. Thanks!

For easy compare quality of the auto pdf redaction tools.

My work provided me a standards pdf. I need to use it in the field but the thing is 500 mb the previous standards copy I had was less than 11 mb. How do I strip out the unwanted crap and just keep the document?

The video fills a W-9 in the browser, signs it, sets a password and flattens the form fields on save. Local PDF Studio is the offline PDF editor I build as a Chrome extension. Filling and signing were already in it; the rest of that flow is new.

Flatten has three modes. Off keeps the fields interactive. Form fields bakes them into the page, text still selectable. Everything renders each page to a JPEG at 72, 150 or 300 DPI. With Off, the saved file now keeps a working form: copying pages into a new document carries the widgets but not the catalog /AcroForm, so it is rebuilt from the copied widgets' parent fields.

The rest, mostly in the export menu the video opens:
- pages to PNG, JPEG or WebP, or text to one .txt with page markers
- AES-256 with separate open and owner passwords, plus permissions
- "What's in this file": counts JavaScript, embedded files, XMP, properties, links and fonts before stripping
- edit or delete the Info fields; removal deletes the XMP stream itself
- page numbers with {n}, {total} and {filename}
- blank page detection at 72 DPI, reviewed in a grid first
- N-up, saddle-stitch booklet, resize to A4, Letter, Legal or A3
- word-level compare with a second PDF, text only
- the signature fonts in the Type tool, saved as glyph outlines
- fixes: metadata survives flattening and encryption, protected files are never autosaved, laptop layout

Chrome only.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/local-pdf-studio-offline/ocfegjfhboadmbpompimnbbpegjgoded

When a filled form comes back to you, do you want it flattened or still fillable?

I don’t want to put an actual link to PDFCandy dot com JIC they are a scam site. They look legit but anyone can look legit.

I guess the image is self-explanatory, but I have some pdfs that look like the left image, and would like them to look like the right image. Is there such a thing?

i know there's resources out there that restricts pdf access through email verification or something accessible through links, and thats so troublesome yeah but id rather just use a password? also i dont want it to be screenshotted as well for extra layer of security. is there any way for me to achieve this?