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submitted 4 months ago by alam@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

Hi folks!

I’m the creator of BentoPDF. It is an open source PDF toolkit that runs entirely in your browser. Your documents stay private, by design.

BentoPDF started as a small side project, but over time it has grown into something much bigger. With our latest major update, BentoPDF now includes 100+ tools, all running fully client-side.

You can do the basics like merge PDFs(while preserving bookmarks), split documents, extract or delete pages, reorder files, rotate pages, and compress PDFs. Thee are also some advanced tools.

You can edit and annotate PDFs directly in the browser: highlight text, add comments, draw shapes, insert images, fill(including XFA) and create forms, manage bookmarks, generate tables of contents, redact, add headers, footers, watermarks, and page numbers.

BentoPDF also supports an extensive range of file conversions. You can convert Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenOffice, Pages, CSV, RTF, EPUB, MOBI, comic book formats, and many more into PDFs, and also convert PDFs back into Word, Excel, images, Markdown, CSV, JSON, and plain text.

For images, BentoPDF supports a massive variety of formats, including HEIC, WebP, SVG, PSD, JP2, and and aalso other formats such as EPUB, CBR/CBZ. You can convert images to PDFs, extract images from PDFs in their original format, or rasterize PDFs with full DPI control.

There are also organization and optimization tools: OCR, PDF/A conversion, booklet creation, N-up layouts, page division, attachment management, layer (OCG) editing, metadata inspection and editing, repair tools, and advanced compression algorithms that rival commercial solutions.

The latest update also includes AI ready extraction tools to export PDFs to structured JSON, extract tables as CSV/Markdown/JSON, and prepare PDFs for RAG and LLM workflows.

All of this works entirely in the browser, without accounts, uploads, or tracking.

This is my first post here and I hope you like it. Any feedback or feature requests are appreciated. Thank you.

Github Link: https://github.com/alam00000/bentopdf

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[-] dhtseany@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 months ago

How about email conversion functionality? I get lots of law offices in the USA looking to push an outlook data file in and receive an organized lot PDF back out. On the roadmap?

[-] alam@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

This is actually coming up in next release

[-] electric_nan@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago

Thanks for this! I saw this post yesterday, and decided to check it out. I installed it locally on my laptop, and am evaluating it for work. If I recommend it for use, we'll get a license :).

Since the idea would be to replace Adobe for non-Pro (and maybe some Pro accounts), ease of use for low-tech users is at the front of my mind. Not being able to "set as default" for PDFs is not ideal, but I understand the limitation comes from running in the browser. Is there some way to open the PDF, and then choose which tool to use? Rather than how it seems now: choose the tool/function, then upload the PDF.

[-] USSEthernet@startrek.website 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Saw this as an option in TrueNAS earlier and will probably be standing this up when I get home today. I was curious about the difference between this and Stirling, but that appears to have been answered. Thank you for what you do and I'll definitely give it a try.

Update: got it up and running. Works great. Wife deals with PDFs a lot and she loves it. Thanks again!

[-] USSEthernet@startrek.website 1 points 3 months ago

So just got this up and running yesterday and today my wife used it for the first time. She did what she needed to do, but we may have come across a bug. I don't know. She had to take a 72 page PDF and break it out into multiple smaller PDFs. While she was doing that, multiple pages in the preview window would keep going blank/white. Not sure if you're aware of something like that, if not I can try to reproduce and grab logs and post them on github.

[-] fubarx@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago

This looks great!

Can you use it to overlay text fields and fill them?

Most of my uses are basic. Like filling out a PDF form that doesn't have proper form entry fields. These are usually older government or bureaucratic/healthcare/school forms.

I end up adding text boxes and entering values, or adding an X on top of a checkbox, adding a signature PNG file and scaling it to fit the size. Sometimes I have to add a highlight overlay. Then I save it all as a single flattened PDF file.

Amazingly, this is hard to do in Acrobat and a lot of apps. I end up using a janky, 10-yo desktop app that is no longer supported.

[-] alam@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago

You mean XFA forms? Then yes it supports it

[-] fubarx@lemmy.world 0 points 4 months ago

OK, just tried it with one of those old forms. Added a text field overlay and a signature. Even flattens before saving. Works great. Awesome, thanks!

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[-] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 0 points 4 months ago

I use this at home and I’m thinking of setting this up at work, to prevent my colleagues from using shady PDF-sites, for merging or splitting PDF-files.

How does the license work for internal use at a company, by it employees?

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[-] Konraddo@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago

Some features seem to limit the working area to only the middle part of the browser. For example, the Multi Tool use 100% width but the Editor uses 33% only. Would love to see all features making full use of the screen size.

[-] alam@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago

There is a use full width toggle which you can find under preferences in setting button in the search bar. I will make this the defult in next release

[-] Konraddo@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago

Perfect! Honestly though, I would expect the gears icon to appear in the top right corner, not in the search bar😅

[-] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 0 points 4 months ago

Interesting!

Can this work server side as well? I'd love a good PDF toolkit to integrate as a backend into my open source system

Most important missing detail though: reliable conversion from HTML to PDF

I'm currently using wkhtnltopdf and it gets unreliable results at best, especially with layout (CSS)

Any suggestions on what tool could do that best?

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[-] Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 4 months ago

I had no clue this existed!!! Thanks for sharing.

Would you say that BentoPDF is an alternative to Adobe Acrobat and/or Bluebeam Revu?

I use those for my job, but it'd be nice to have a FLOSS alternative as a backup

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this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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