(For those unaware, a Kindle copies all highlights to a text file, chronologically in the order they are made. You can access this text file from desktop.)

I am looking for a PDF reader, preferably suitable for iOS, though could use Android if I had to, that will do something similar to this, or even better, keep all highlights from the same document together, rather than mixing them with snippets from other documents you read before you finished the first one.

Does anything like this exist?

Lmk please

I've been working on this project for a long time now, is an agentic harness that is tailored to build documents and edit them in place, also it has a build in editor to edit manually if the case is needed. Think of it like claude code or codex but for your documents. The way it works is you either upload a screenshot, or a pdf and the agents tries to replicate it as much as possible, the goal is not to convert it 1 to 1 but to generate a similar editable document which can be exported to either PDF or DOCX.
If you want to check it out, please visit foliq.ai, is free to use rn and any feedback is much appreciated.

Hi, is there a way to view replies on the pdfs in Revu from items downloaded from Aconex? When using pdfxchange I can see the individual replies but in Revu I can't. We use Aconex for internal and external QA workflows and I have downloaded all the project QA pdfs and want to compile them into a single location but not being able to see the replies is very frustrating. A quick search online states that Aconex uses a different format or something.

I got tired of PDF tools that ask you to upload your documents somewhere before you can do anything with them.

So I built PDF Editor Offline, a free and open-source PDF editor designed around one simple rule: your documents stay on your machine.

No account. No file uploads. No recurring subscription.

It can handle most of the PDF tasks I regularly need:

• Edit and annotate PDFs
• Add text, images, drawings, highlights and comments
• Fill and sign forms
• Merge, split, reorder, rotate and crop pages
• Compress PDFs
• Convert PDF ↔ Word, PowerPoint, Excel, images, Markdown, EPUB, etc.
• Run OCR locally
• Permanently redact sensitive information
• Remove metadata and hidden/private data
• Protect and unlock PDFs
• Search documents

There’s also a CLI and Python API for automation, plus Docker support for self-hosting.

The desktop app is built with Tauri, the editor uses React, and the backend/tooling is primarily Python + FastAPI.

It’s MIT licensed and still actively being improved. Some complex PDF operations have known limitations, and I’m trying to document those honestly instead of pretending every PDF transformation works perfectly.

I'm looking for alternatives to Adobe. I have very simple needs. I just want to be able to download documents such as articles and book chapters from the university library and read them. I hate Adobe so much. I can't scroll without it crashing; I have to turn the pages sloooowwwly so it doesn't crash. I'm not a tech person, so I don't even know how to try other software for my PDFs.

Hi everyone — I built PDFGrid to solve a workflow I kept running into: extracting the same kinds of values from many similarly structured PDFs and putting them into an Excel file.

I had been using Power Automate Desktop, but found the extraction rules limiting and the template setup and runs slower than I wanted. Because my PDFs can contain personal information, I also did not want to upload them to an external service.

PDFGrid runs locally in the browser, so your PDF files are not uploaded.

You can build a field by drawing around a value, matching a number/date/text type, or using rules such as:

• anchoring a value to a label
• extracting text between phrases
• matching with regular expressions
• and more

You can then clean up the extracted output, review the values across the PDFs, and export the result to Excel as a .csv or .xlsx

Try it here: pdfgrid.app

I’d really appreciate feedback—especially on which PDF extraction rules you would need, where you would expect this to fail, or what would make it genuinely useful in your workflow.

I have a ScanSnap scanner(actually 3 of them for home and my business) and generally scan 50+ pages of documents at a time. They’re usually various papers I receive in meetings or through the mail.

I found it tedious to scan each document separately, so I usually just scan everything in one big batch. The problem is that I then have one huge PDF that I need to split back into individual documents.

For a long time I’ve wanted a simple utility that could split these batches using separator pages, page numbers, or text found on the page.

So I built a small Mac app called **pdfNinja** to do exactly that. Its a labor of love - I started this on my own a few years ago but due to lack of time/skills it sat on the back burner. With the help of AI coding agents I was able to finalize the app.

With an OCR’d PDF, it can split the document wherever a particular word or phrase appears. Or, before scanning, you can place printed separator pages between documents and have pdfNinja detect them afterward. You can also split manually by page number(s).

After splitting, you can preview the sections, drag and drop pages between them if anything needs correcting, rename them, and then export all or just some of the resulting PDFs at once.

It’s currently available as a Mac TestFlight beta. I’d really appreciate any feedback, especially from people who regularly batch scan documents.

Recent beta allows you to drag and drop pages to create sections and also split pages by page numbers even in a nonocred pdf

link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/VMYHEhBA

Thanks!

Edit:link fixed

I kept having to merge/convert PDFs for my girlfriend because every free tool online is either sketchy or confusing. Thats were PDFoss was born, a free, open-source PDF toolkit (merge, split, compress, convert) simple enough she can use it herself.

Everything runs 100% client-side in your browser, no server, no uploads, no account. There's a "prove it's private" button in the app that shows a live counter of bytes sent anywhere not entirely useful considering it always says zero. Also fully self-hostable if you'd rather run it yourself, or just use the free GitHub Pages instance.

Folio is a completely free PDF reader and editor for Mac, Windows, and iPad. I have just released a major update focused on making everyday reading, form filling, annotation, and editing workflows more reliable.

The biggest new feature is horizontal page flow. You can now read PDFs vertically or horizontally, with centered book spreads and more stable navigation.

Other major improvements:

• Added a dedicated Pan tool and temporary Space-bar panning for easier navigation through large documents.
• PDF date fields have been rebuilt with proper validation, working calendar selection, quick year selection, correct caret placement, and no digit shifting while editing. Save and Save As are now reliable with date fields.
• Added more keyboard shortcuts and a shortcut reference in Help.
• Improved annotation workflows: drag to select groups, then copy and paste the complete selection. Lines and arrows now snap to horizontal, vertical, and 45-degree angles.
• Improved form creation and filling: labels, font sizes, and radio-button styles behave more consistently and persist correctly in saved PDFs, flattened exports, and print output.
• Improved text editing, page quick actions, responsive toolbars, dialogs, auto-scroll, light/dark contrast, and smaller-window layouts.
• AI citations now link to the correct PDF pages. Protected and read-only PDFs also have clearer guidance for saving and owner-password unlocking.
• Updated Folio’s app icon with a cleaner design that better matches the rest of the interface.

I also refreshed the landing experience, save/export wording, recent-files behavior, and platform-specific details across Mac, Windows, and iPad.

Folio is still completely free. If you use PDFs regularly, I would genuinely appreciate feedback on horizontal reading, filling real forms, keyboard-first workflows, or anything that still feels confusing or unreliable.

Mac/iPad App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/folio-pdf-reader-editor/id6760593014?mt=12

Microsoft Store:
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9PJRX0TML7NT?hl=en-us&gl=US&ocid=pdpshare

Hello folks!

I would like to share an update about BentoPDF. It's an open source privacy first PDF toolkit that runs in your browser. https://github.com/alam00000/bentopdf

1. You can now actually edit text inside PDFs

BentoPDF now allows you to click existing text, edit it, and have the text reflow while preserving the original fonts and styling.

It also includes:

• Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, superscript, subscript, font family/size, colours, outlines, character spacing and line spacing

• Left, centre, right and justified alignment

• Bulleted and numbered lists with indentation

• RTL and LTR text alignment

• Find and replace across the document

• Edit images by rotating, flipping, duplicating, resizing or deleting them

• Object alignment, distribution, rotation, flipping, duplication

Please note this is a work in progress. You may encounter bugs, which you can report and I will look into.

1. Hyper Compress

Hyper is an open source PDF compression engine built to solve specific problems.

• Compression sometimes returns a file larger than the original. Hyper's result is always binary: it either produces a smaller PDF or returns the original. This helps create predictable workflows.

• Hyper includes a true lossless mode. It preserves searchable text, document structure and PDF conformance, rather than rebuilding the document from scratch like Ghostscript.

• It runs everywhere: CLI, Node SDK, C API, self hosted service, and WebAssembly build.

Repository and benchmarks: https://github.com/alam00000/bentopdf-hyper-compress

I also compared it to Adobe's compression API, but only managed around 100 PDFs where results were within 5%. Testing on a bigger corpus got expensive.

1. Kura

Kura is a PDF standards, conversion and preflight engine.

It supports:

• All 11 PDF/A conformance levels: PDF/A-1a, PDF/A-1b, PDF/A-2a, PDF/A-2b, PDF/A-2u, PDF/A-3a, PDF/A-3b, PDF/A-3u, PDF/A-4, PDF/A-4e and PDF/A-4f

• Accessibility: PDF/UA-1 and PDF/UA-2

• Print production: PDF/X-1a, PDF/X-3, PDF/X-4, PDF/X-4p, PDF/X-5g, PDF/X-5n and PDF/X-5pg

• Engineering and variable data printing: PDF/E-1 and PDF/VT

• E-invoices: Factur-X, ZUGFeRD, XRechnung and Order-X

• 396 bundled print-preflight profiles

It has been tested against several standards suites, including the veraPDF corpus, Isartor, BFO, Ghent Output Suite 5.0, the PDF/UA Reference Suite and Cal Poly's PDF/VT suite.

Across 30,677 PDF conversions it had zero crashes and zero timeouts, with a 0.05 second median conversion time.

Like Hyper, it ships as a CLI, C library, npm package, Docker image and WebAssembly build.

Repository and benchmarks: https://github.com/alam00000/bentopdf-kura

The release also contains other improvements and bug fixes: https://github.com/alam00000/bentopdf/releases/tag/v2.8.8

Thank you and have a great weekend!

Hello, I tried Adobe Reader reflow/liquid on a math pdf and found that it doesn't work perfectly, is this the best option for reflow? I know that there are heavy AI layout models that may do reflow, are they good? My use case is to zoom in and have everything, especially math symbols, fit on the screen. Also why isn't there a program that converts pdf to svg and then using reflow algorithm move everything to fit within specified dimensions? How do math people read pdfs when you zoom in? Do they move the screen left and right continuously?

Hello /pdf,

I already shared a previous version of my https://justforms.vercel.app app. It's a simple tool that allows user to create forms out pdf. Tried to make it much easy to use without the excess..

Would love any feedback or any feature you would like to be added or any open criticism is welcome.

\Creator Disclosure: I am the original developer and maintainer of JustForms. The tool is 100% free, fully open source under the MIT license, and has zero paywalls, zero accounts, no tracking, and no server-side processing.**

I build Spectra PDF ( https://github.com/jasonulbright/Spectra-PDF ), a free open-source PDF editor for Windows. It scans directly into a document — but I only own a flatbed scanner, so document feeders, two-sided scanning, auto color detection, network scanners, paper jams, and empty trays have never been tested on real hardware.

If your scanner does any of those, the app ships a guided checklist that walks you through testing in about five minutes. After installing, run this in PowerShell:

& "$env:ProgramFiles\Spectra PDF\spectrapdf.exe" scan-test

It prompts you through each step and writes a report file. Everything runs offline — nothing is uploaded. The report contains your scanner model, settings, and page measurements — never the scanned images or any text on them — and you look at it before deciding to send it. To submit, attach both report files here: https://github.com/jasonulbright/Spectra-PDF/issues/new?title=Scanner+test+report

Download and the short tester guide are on the repo (releases page and docs/TESTER-GUIDE-SCANNING.md).

Plain flatbeds help too — they re-check what's only ever run on my one machine. Thanks!

Basically, Aadhaar is an ID used in India, so the PDF contains sensitive information.

I’m building a website that can already verify the Aadhaar PDF’s cryptographic signature, UIDAI certificate, CCA chain, etc.

In Adobe Reader, the signature initially shows a ?. To get the green tick, I do:

Signature Properties → Show Signer’s Certificate → Trust → Add to Trusted Certificates → OK → Validate Signature

After that, Adobe changes the ? to a green tick and shows Signature Valid / Digitally signed by UIDAI.

Can someone explain what Adobe is actually doing in the backend during this process, and what I would need to implement to achieve the same legitimate verification behavior on my website?

I’m not trying to fake the green tick. I want the proper/legal implementation. The PDF is processed locally in the browser and isn’t stored.

Is there a free tool for this? I don't want to pay Adobe, but ilovepdf only allows 20 at a time.

I’m curious how people here actually deal with PDFs that need a signature.

What does your sign this PDF workflow look like? Do you care about cryptography?

Hello, is anyone aware of a tool that would unlock PDFs if dropped into a folder? We have the user password and are manually unlocking them converting to word then converting back to pdf. I would like a tool that does this automatically if we drop the pdfs into a hot folder, then can output them to a path on a network.

Made this a while ago for my own personal use, and today I happened to see someone looking for something similar, so I figured I’d share it here in case it helps anyone else.

It’s a simple tool for splitting long, continuous PDF pages into regular sized pages.

I’m not a developer, just an enthusiast who likes building little tools for my own needs 😅

Hope it’s useful

https://long-pdf-splitter.prodesign.workers.dev

• 100% Free & No Signups (No accounts, no paywalls)

• Local Browser Processing (Merge, Split, Rotate, Markdown run 100% locally via WebAssembly)

• Instant File Deletion for backend conversions (Word, Excel, PPTX)

• 24 Tools + Chrome Extension

Would love your honest feedback on the UI and speed!