Programming

Merging PDFs in the browser: no server, no upload

Merging PDFs sounds like server work, but the PDF format is just a structured binary file — and libraries like pdf-lib can read and write it entirel…

How to convert a PDF drawing into an editable DXF (without uploading your drawings)

If you work with construction or survey drawings, you have probably received a PDF and needed the same drawing in CAD. Print shops and cloud convert…

How to Get a Table Out of a PDF Without Uploading the File

Bank statements, invoices and supplier price lists often arrive as PDFs. When you need the numbers in a spreadsheet, the usual advice is to upload t…

I benchmarked 8 PDF extractors on 27 documents from 1 to 487 pages. Here's what broke, and what won.

I knew something was off when two numbers landed in the same afternoon. Every tool that reads the PDF text layer had scored exactly 0.00 on every ch…

Getting a PDF under 100 KB without turning the text into a picture

The form said "PDF, maximum 100 KB". My file was a one-page letter exported from Word, and it was several times that. I ran it through the first onl…

6 Free PDF Editors You Can Use in a Browser in 2026 (and What Happens to Your File in Each)

A fact-checked comparison of Smallpdf, iLovePDF, PDF24, Sejda, Adobe Acrobat online and PDFkind: free limits, what "free" actually unlocks, and whet…

Build a PDF Size Gate Before Your Document Pipeline Hits “Send”

The report rendered perfectly. The upload failed anyway. The bug was not in the report A successful build with an unusable artifact The job had done…

Бесплатная верстка и перевод книг: как я создал конвейер, работающий на видеокарте

Три месяца отладки, десятки книг и переход от Claude к локальным моделям. Рассказываю, как собрал открытый конвейер перевода и вёрстки книг: MinerU…

Auditable Monthly Report Archiving with PDF Text Extraction and OCR Verification

Short answer: extract embedded PDF text first, but make the decision per page rather than per file; send only pages that fail structural and content…

JSON Tiles: Fast Analytics on Semi-Structured Data (2021)

Abstract: Developers often prefer flexibility over upfront schema design, making semi-structured data formats such as JSON increasingly popular. Lar…

PDF to Excel in the Browser: Extracting Tables with JavaScript

Series: Building PdfWord — a free, no-backend PDF tools site (Part 11) "Convert my bank statement PDF to Excel" — one of the most requested features…

Не хочу грузить свои документы в онлайн-сервисы. Поэтому сжимаю PDF прямо в браузере

Нужно было загрузить на сайт посольства пакет документов одним PDF – свидетельство о рождении, дипломы, справки. Лимит – 1 МБ. Загружать сканы всех…

How To Write Shared Libraries (2011)

5 PDF Tools Nobody Else Gives You for Free (All Running 100% in Your Browser)

Series: Building PdfWord — a free, no-backend PDF tools site (Part 6) Most free PDF sites give you the same 10 tools: merge, split, compress, conver…

pdf.js split my numbers: rebuilding "CHF 15,000" from text items

We re-read a few hundred fee schedules every week, many of them published as PDFs, and check that a quoted amount is still on the page. One bank's p…

Why your photo-to-PDF pages come out in the wrong order (and how to sort them in the browser)

If you've built an "images to PDF" feature, you've probably had this bug report: "I picked page 1, 2, 3, 4 and the PDF came out 3, 1, 4, 2." Nothing…

Multi-Currency Invoice PDF Localisation Explained: Right-to-Left Layout Before Signing

Short answer: for multi currency invoice PDF localisation, generate from structured values, validate the right-to-left visual reading order, and onl…

Perseus: A Fail-Slow Detection Framework for Cloud Storage Systems (2023)

Abstract: The newly-emerging “fail-slow” failures plague both software and hardware where the victim components are still functioning yet with degra…

I Built a Browser-Local PDF Redaction Tool Because a Black Rectangle Isn't Redaction

A black rectangle can hide text on screen without removing the text stored inside a PDF. Someone may still be able to select, copy, search, or recov…

Bidirectional Type Slicing

Abstract: Development tools report what type an expression has, but not why it has that type. This paper develops a theory of type slicing that answ…

What Redaction Means in Node.js — PDF Lease Overlays Still Expose Text

TL;DR: Redaction removes sensitive content from a PDF. A black rectangle only covers that content on the page; the original text can remain selectab…

Merge PDFs in the browser with pdf-lib, and what it silently drops

You can merge PDFs entirely in the browser with pdf-lib . No server, no upload, about ten lines. We use exactly this in a small tool, so here is the…

Stuck Freight PDF Jobs: Debugging Progress Polling with Auditable Terminal States

Short answer: put a finite deadline around polling, model success and failure as explicit terminal states, and preserve an append-only event trail f…

Customization: Optimizing Compiler Technology for SELF, a Dynamically-Typed Object-Oriented Programming Language (1989)

Dynamically-typed object-oriented languages please programmers, but their lack of static type information penalizes performance. Our new implementat…

Отчёты на DOCX в FARA CRM: шаблоны в Word, редактор в браузере и PDF через LibreOffice

Счёт на оплату, договор, акт, отчёт о продажах за месяц — без документов CRM остаётся записной книжкой. В FARA CRM мы закрыли эту задачу отчётами на…

Программа поиска по PDF. Разбираем PageIndex, Streamlit и ссылки на страницы

«Срок гарантии — 18 месяцев». Красивый ответ. А если в договоре написано 12? Или число 18 стоит в разделе о хранении, а модель просто зацепилась за…

Как я собрал бота коммерческих предложений на чистом stdlib и рендерю PDF через headless Chrome

Я дизайнер интерфейсов и работаю как фрилансер. На каждое коммерческое предложение у меня уходило часа три: смета в таблице, вёрстка, экспорт, прове…

Puppeteer PDF headers and footers with page numbers: 7 traps

Adding "Page 3 of 7" to a Puppeteer PDF looks like one option. You set displayHeaderFooter: true , pass a footerTemplate , and render. Then the foot…

Monthly Game Reports — Merge One PDF or ZIP Separate Files

A monthly game report is rarely one document. Finance owns the revenue pages, live operations owns event results, and player support owns moderation…

Native vs OCR PDF Text in Node.js: Choose Page Indexing by Ownership

TL;DR: Use born-digital text extraction when your B2B SaaS team owns the PDF templates; preserve the extractor's page boundary and index only redact…