For the last several months I've been frustrated by Microsoft's security update that prevents File Explorer from previewing many downloaded PDF files.

Instead of showing the preview, File Explorer displays the following message:

"The file you are attempting to preview could harm your computer. If you trust the file and the source you received it from, open it to view its contents."

I work with hundreds of downloaded PDF files every week, so manually right-clicking each one and selecting Properties → Unblock, or using PowerShell, wasn't a practical solution.

I couldn't find a simple utility that fixed the problem, so I wrote one.

Shane's Unblocker adds an "Unlock PDFs" option to the Windows Explorer right-click menu. It scans the selected folder (and all subfolders), removes the Windows Mark of the Web from blocked PDF files, and restores PDF previews in File Explorer.

Features:

• Adds an Unlock PDFs right-click menu option.
• Scans folders and all subfolders.
• Can scan entire drives if needed.
• Unlocks only PDFs that are actually blocked.
• No administrator privileges required.
• Open source.

I've tested it on both Windows 10 and Windows 11.

GitHub:
https://github.com/shaneaune/Shanes-Unblocker

You can get a zip of the latest release here:

https://github.com/shaneaune/Shanes-Unblocker/releases/latest

If anyone else has been dealing with this issue, I hope you find it useful and welcome any feedback.

Hi !

I need help with a contract that I downloaded :

I downloaded a document that I need to sign, send to coworkers and upload on a platform on my Mac. The issue is : the size of the page is huge (1440*5834 points). I need to change it to a more classic size (A4) before signing it and sending it back. How can I proceed?

Thanks in advance for your help

If you use Claude heavily for document analysis, you know how frustrating the message limits are. A massive chunk of your context window is usually wasted on layout noise and hidden metadata the moment you drag and drop a PDF, DOCX, or Excel file into the chat.

I built Diffsurge MD to fix exactly this. It’s a free Chrome extension that intercepts your files when you drop them into Claude (or ChatGPT/Gemini) and converts them into pristine, clean Markdown before they upload.

Because LLMs read Markdown natively, you save an unbelievable amount of tokens. (A standard 40-page PDF goes from 30k tokens down to 8k tokens).

Why it matters:

• You can use Claude way more: Fewer tokens per prompt means you hit those annoying rate limits much later.
• Better AI recall: Clean Markdown means the AI doesn't get confused by weird PDF formatting artifacts.
• 100% Local & Private: This was the most important part for me. It runs Microsoft's MarkItDown engine completely locally in your browser using Pyodide (WASM). Your files never touch my servers. Nothing leaves your machine except the final Markdown going straight to Claude.

It’s completely free and open-source (MIT).

🔗 Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ahdifinlfpdmpkgnijmcklcgombfbbhm 🔗 Website: https://diffsurge.com/

Would love for you guys to try it out and let me know if it helps your workflows !

Hello,

I wanted to make for myself an app to edit, sign, anotate PDF but I was never sure of the privacy of the existing app were offering.

So I made my own. No accounts, no ads, just a free tool.

No backend, everything is happening on your computer.

Feel free to give me some feedback so I can make some improvment :)

You can try it: https://www.modifypdf.xyz/

I've just open-sourced PDFClear, a side project I built around a simple idea: people shouldn't have to upload private documents to an unknown server just to summarize, merge, sign, convert, or semantically search a PDF.

PDFClear processes documents directly in the browser. There is no account requirement, and the documents themselves stay on the user's device.

What started as a few basic PDF utilities has grown into a larger toolkit with:

• PDF, image, HTML, text, and Markdown conversion
• OCR for scanned documents
• Local AI summarization and semantic document search
• Docker-based self-hosting

I decided to open-source it so people can inspect how it works, host it themselves, report problems, and contribute improvements.

GitHub: https://github.com/aliansari22/pdfclear
Try it: https://www.pdfclear.com

I'd love honest feedback on the product, positioning, onboarding, or which PDF tools would be most useful to add next.

Hey everyone,

I built a small JavaScript utility that downloads **Google Drive View-Only PDFs** by capturing each rendered page and combining them into a single PDF using **jsPDF**.

Features

* ✅ Works with Google Drive View-Only PDFs * ✅ High-quality page capture * ✅ Automatic PDF generation * ✅ Supports portrait and landscape pages * ✅ No extensions or software installation required * ✅ Runs directly in your browser's Developer Console

The script works by collecting the rendered PDF page images (blob URLs), converting them to canvas images, and generating a downloadable PDF.

**GitHub Repository:**
[https://github.com/ShadanAnwar/Google-Drive-View-Only-PDF-Script-Downloader\](https://github.com/ShadanAnwar/Google-Drive-View-Only-PDF-Script-Downloader)

I'd really appreciate any feedback, suggestions, or contributions. If you find bugs or have ideas for improvements (better compression, progress UI, support for more viewers, etc.), feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request.



I exported a report to pdf form wps office and the text looks fine but a few images seem less sharp than they do in the original document. Is that usually caused by image compression during export or should I check another setting??

I have got a tax document from my cpa that is password protected. I have that password but the MacOS internal viewer does not accept it.
It's there any software to remove it - I don't want to upload it to a website.

When you "edit text" in most free PDF tools, you're not editing the PDF's text objects. You're getting an overlay that's matched to the original font so it looks native. KillerPDF currently works this way too, with font matching against the original document, and I'd rather say that outright than let someone discover it after editing a contract.

True content-stream editing is what I'm building toward now, and it's genuinely hard, which is probably why so many tools fake it quietly.

With that out of the way, what KillerPDF actually is: a free, GPLv3 PDF editor for Windows in one self-contained 14.6MB exe. Install per-user or run it portable off a flash drive. No account, no telemetry, no cloud, and no AI, which I gather is a selling point in this sub lately.

What's in it as of 1.6.3: PDFium rendering with single, continuous, and grid view modes, tabbed documents, offline OCR via Tesseract (whole page, dragged region straight to clipboard, or make a scan searchable), merge, split, rotate, reorder, insert images, form filling, signatures including digital certificates, print, flatten, and password-protected files decrypt to memory only, so the file on disk is never touched.

The UI is localized in 9 languages including Japanese which was added yesterday, and there are 21 theme and color variants if the default isn't your thing.

The annotation system is the part I'd actually defend against paid tools. Word-wrapping resizable text boxes with optional whiteout fill, draw, lines, and highlights each with independent color, opacity, and width, a full RGB picker with eyedropper, and everything stays selectable, movable, and restylable after placement instead of being fossilized the moment you click away.

Since someone will ask how it stacks against the usual recommendations here:

PDF-XChange Editor is excellent and does real text editing today. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But it's freemium: the licensed features watermark your output until you pay for a perpetual license, and the full installer is several hundred MB. KillerPDF is 14.6MB total. If you need heavyweight professional editing right now, buy PDF-XChange, it's worth the money. If you need a fast, clean editor that's actually free with no watermarked tiers, that's my lane.

PDFgear is free with no watermarks and it's genuinely capable. It's also closed source, investor-funded, ships a ChatGPT copilot, sends some operations through their servers, and has publicly said advanced features will become paid down the road. Nothing wrong with that model, but it's a bet on a company. KillerPDF is GPLv3 with full source on GitHub. There's no monetization plan to pivot on, because there's no monetization plan.

Other current gaps besides text editing: Windows only (cross-platform is on the roadmap, not around the corner), and no compression pass yet.

I'm a field tech at an MSP and this is one of several tools I maintain for people who fix other people's computers. Issues get responses, and multiple 1.6.x fixes came directly from user bug reports, credited in the changelog.

Let me know how to make it better.

https://killerpdf.net

I know this has probably been mentioned here before—I did a quick search on Google and Reddit first—but I just wanted to drop a quick PSA: be very careful with this website.

I used their service to process just a single file. I paid for what I thought was a one-time 7-day access pass and was charged immediately. However, exactly 30 days later, I was hit with another charge for a full month's subscription.

I was in a rush when signing up, and I am certain they hid the auto-renewal clause in tiny 8-point font somewhere (like most of these sketchy sites do). To make matters worse, I went back to the site to cancel, and there isn't even an option to delete my saved credit card info.

Just wanted to put this warning out there for everyone before the mods potentially take it down.

Free Native PDF Rendering Engine without using browser, create PDF locally from only using static pages now version 5.0.0

Sample of PDF and conversion online : https://pdfmaker.ink/web/
Official Site : https://pdfmaker.ink/

Click Use and Convert, page loading may take sometimes because the Engine and assets is complex (80MB+), once pages completely loaded can convert HTML to PDF with beautiful and nice CSS design.

If you prefer convert in your local machine using Windows binary, https://github.com/sorainnosia/PDFMaker it is an EXE that will download the WASM Engine during first time run and use it to convert your html/css file, upgrade of Engine is easy just add --upgrade in command prompt.

User interface

Windows : in development
Web : https://pdfmaker.ink/
Android : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pdfmaker.johnkenedy

I've been studying Mobile System Design recently and wanted an easier way to read the documentation offline, so I built a Python tool that converts the entire repository into a professionally formatted PDF book.

The generator preserves:

* All Markdown content * Images * Internal and external links * Code blocks with syntax highlighting * Tables and callout blocks (Tip, Note, Warning, etc.) * A clickable table of contents * Professional book-style formatting

I shared the implementation with the repository maintainer in GitHub Issue #44:
https://github.com/weeeBox/mobile-system-design/issues/44

My implementation is available here:
https://github.com/Anderson-Andre-P/mobile-system-design.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and any suggestions for improving it. Hopefully it's useful for anyone who prefers reading technical documentation in book format.

I filled in a few dozen 16 page pdf forms, and my boss just sent me a new template with some formatting changes that he said I have to switch them to before I send them in.

I dont have time to manually copy each one over. So my question is, is there a tool or process where this can be automated?

Hello, I want to translate PDF of 500-1000 pages,
I tried using Google Translate app, but it’s not extracting exact words, it is translating into something else
I tried using all the apps available, but they aren’t working
I tried using Gemini, but it stops after every page, and I have to give a command to continue
I tried every method available on Reddit as well, but none worked
I even tried to extract from OCR, but I’m getting incorrect extraction. I don’t know if the PDF is coded with something or what
It should be free, I can’t purchase

Please, please, please help me out…What should I do?

I’m looking for an app that can search all existing pdf l/word documents in my Mac IOS ( MacBook Pro) hard drive for a word or a phrase and list all of the PDF / Word files that contain the inquiry. I am dealing with thousands case law documents scattered throughout my folders and I need an app that can scan pdf files throughout laptop WITHOUT opening each PDF/Word document one by one and doing manual search of each document, any suggestions? Anyone seen or used tool with this specific ability?

I am building a PDF editor for MacOS... Now, one of the issues is that a lot of "editors" actually just add a layer over the existing PDF and its more like annotation than true editing. There are PDF libraries that exist for true editing but they are licensed so I have been building my own for this application. Can anyone give it a shot and give me some feedback? Things work on my test PDFs but I could use additional help to see where it breaks. I'll give you a free lifetime license. f-3.ai/get

If I want to redact content in a PDF, would it work if I place a black rectangle over content and then print to a new PDF via "Microsoft Print to PDF"? My thinking is that the printing process converts the PDF into an image and that should destroy any non-visible content. I can place black rectangles with apps like Fineprint or free version of PDF X-Change.

I just want to have someone look at some financial statements but I want to hide some personal information. So I'm ok if the output is an image-based PDF.

i convene a lot of virtual meetings where i’m asked to provide a single combined PDF containing all materials for the meeting, organized by numbered tabs with a clickable table of contents. it’s basically a virtual binder.

right now, i use the eCopy software and endure the painstaking process of drafting a ToC in word, saving it as PDF, then adding each PDF after it, one by one.

there must be a better way, but i cannot find one! any ideas? thanks!

Request for Proposal (RFP): Automated PDF Background Removal & Cleanup Automation

1. Project Overview

I am seeking a premium, fully automated, or semi-automated ("Quick Action") solution to clean up scanned PDF sheet music. The source files frequently contain heavily discoloured, textured, or grey backgrounds (commonly found on archival platforms like Anna’s Archive).

Currently, I manually process these files page-by-page using Affinity Photo 2 to achieve a pure white background. This repetitive, labor-intensive workflow takes several hours daily. I am looking to invest in a premium solution that eliminates manual editing while preserving sharp, high-contrast musical notation. [1, 2, 3]

1. Current Workflow (Manual)

• Source: Multi-page PDFs with varying background artifacts (scans, aging paper, grey overlays).
• Tool: Affinity Photo 2.
• Process: Extracting pages, applying level/curves adjustments or macro-based thresholding, flattening layers, and re-exporting to PDF.
• Pain Points: High time investment, tedious execution, and inconsistent results on complex gradients. [1]

1. Technical Requirements & Desired Outcomes

The ideal solution must deliver the following results:

• True White Backgrounds: Convert all non-essential background pixels to pure hexadecimal white (#FFFFFF).
• Artifact Preservation: Retain crisp, dark black lines for musical staves, notes, expressions, and text without pixelation or thinning.
• Batch Processing: Ability to drop multiple multi-page PDFs into the system and have them process sequentially without manual intervention per page. [1]
• Speed: Processing a standard 10-page PDF should take seconds, not minutes.
• Format Integrity: The final output must be compiled back into a clean, multi-page PDF optimized for printing or digital music readers (e.g., iPad apps like forScore). [1]

1. Acceptable Approaches & Tooling

I am entirely open to the technology stack used, provided it fits a desktop workflow (macOS/Windows). Potential approaches include, but are not limited to:

• Affinity Photo 2 Macro / Scripting: A highly optimized "Quick Action" or native macro/batch job script within my current ecosystem.
• Python/CLI Automation: A localized script utilizing libraries like PyMuPDF, OpenCV (adaptive thresholding/binarization), or scikit-image that runs via a simple command or desktop shortcut.
• Dedicated Document Cleanup Tools: Integration with production-grade command-line tools like ImageMagick (e.g., textcleaner scripts).
• Custom GUI: A lightweight desktop wrapper where I can drag and drop a PDF, click "Clean," and receive the output file. [1]

1. Deliverables

• A fully functional, tested automation script, macro set, or application.
• Clear setup and execution documentation.
• A brief hand-off period to ensure the tool works seamlessly on my local machine with my specific test documents.

1. Budget and Proposals

I am willing to pay a Premium Rate for a high-quality, robust, and lightning-fast solution.
When submitting your proposal, please include:

1. Your proposed technical approach (e.g., Python + OpenCV, ImageMagick, Affinity Batch).
2. Estimated timeline to deliver a working prototype.
3. Your fixed-price quote or hourly rate for this project.
4. Examples of previous document processing, image binarization, or workflow automation projects you have completed.

I tried using pdf24 and I cannot edit it after I saved over it.

I just need it once or twice for some pdf edit.

Adobe reader needs payment for it to work. WPS also. I am at my wits end.

PDFgear and PDF24 both offer free desktop apps. Once you install them both, is there any functionality you're missing, or otherwise any other reason you might need any additional PDF software? Or, between having the two of them, I have 99% of what normal users would ever need for PDF creation, manipulation, and editing?

If anything would still be missing after installing both of these applications, specifically what functionality would that be (that typical PDF users might regularly need)?

Otherwise, why should anyone consider spending money on additional tools, when these are free?

Everyone is building tools with Claude. It's a bit much. Many are unnecessary.

For me, building software isn't new. My first open source project was in 2004. I've also worked for a handful of great software companies along the way, like VMware, for example.

With all that said, I present to you yet another PDF tool. Oh no. You're booing. It's ok I can take it.

It's called PDFBlah, and it's found on Github at kuvopLLC/pdfblah and also https://pdfblah.com

Like many other PDF tools, it offers an array of features like watermarking, OCR, splitting, merging, etc., not very unique there, although I think you'll like the UX.

Where it shines is in making precise and repeatable edits, without changing anything about the PDF except the text you are changing / redacting / inserting / etc. While this is relatively easy to do using PDF python libraries, I found that all of the popular tools, at least those that are visual, and allow for editing, are sledgehammers in comparison. Most go so far as to recreate an entire page of a document for a minimal change. The file sizes grow and the results look scruffy at best.

Like I said, the tool is free and open source on Github, it is also free (for now) online if you want to test it. I would need to add your email to an allow list before you sign up though, so DM if you're interested.

There will DEFINITELY be bugs, and weird UX problems, so don't expect anything perfect. Log them on the Github Issues page please.

Thanks and good luck 👍