this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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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

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[–] TheFinn@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 10 hours ago (4 children)

Are there ways to use it via an API? In particular I'd love to be able to programmatically submit a Word or Excel document and receive a PDF back

[–] Passerby6497@lemmy.world 6 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) (1 children)

Agreed. I spent a bit of time writing out a script for similar functionality for one of our business units, but I never was able to figure out how to convert excel sheets to a PDF to be able to merge them in the allotted time, so it just doesn't support them lol.

But I can see why it wouldn't have an API, since the whole deal is it stays in your browser, and an API would mean sending the files to the server.

[–] TheFinn@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 8 hours ago

Maybe there's some way to use selenium or something like that so that it stays local.

[–] alam@lemmy.world 4 points 5 hours ago

As its fully client side, it doesn't expose any APIS. HOwever, I am writing an API only version of bentopdf on Rust

[–] partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 3 points 10 hours ago

My work processes PDFs from government sites, filling them out for end users automatically. Would be cool if the API could do this somehow. Parse fields, and let you put text into them.

[–] Konraddo@lemmy.world 1 points 50 minutes ago

Unsure it fits your scenario but you could use VBA. In my case, we collect data via Excel then they get populated into a Word report template, and finally export to PDF for project delivery purposes, all automated using VBA.