this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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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

(page 3) 40 comments
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[–] water1309@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

I could really use this, so I will definitely set this up. I saw there is an issue open for adding hyperlinks. Any word on how that is progressing (or not)?

[–] electric_nan@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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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[–] fusionsaint@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This is a wild coincidence. I was just looking for something like this. Time to go tinker.

[–] alam@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago
[–] BoxOfFeet@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This would be fantastic for at work. I saw in another comment that it's a one time fee commercial use license. That's fantastic. How it with merging PDFs with different page sizes and orientations? I would use it for merging drawing packages together, and there's a mix of like, A0, A1, and A3.

[–] alam@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

It can merge any type of pages. Also, if there is bookmarks in your PDFs, then it also preserves it. There's also an alternate merge feature in case you want (:

[–] sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Love this idea!

Apologies if you've written this elsewhere, but do you have a write up of what inspired this project? Particularly why a selfhosted solution vs. client software?

My guess is:

  • Compatible on all devices
  • Unified editing experience on all devices
  • ??

Thanks! 

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[–] yakko@feddit.uk 1 points 2 months ago

This is right up my street, thanks!!

[–] smoker@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I have been looking for something like this for ages. I could kiss you rn 😘

[–] alam@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

lol thank you

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