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

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[–] BoxOfFeet@lemmy.world 1 points 21 hours 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 21 hours 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 (:

[–] water1309@lemmy.world 1 points 20 hours 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)?

[–] yakko@feddit.uk 1 points 18 hours ago

This is right up my street, thanks!!

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 1 points 17 hours 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?

[–] alam@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago

Nope. But an API version will be released soon

[–] JigglySackles@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I'm stoked to give it a try. I left my last PDF application because they injected AI into it. So I've been shopping around a little. I've been using Okular, but it's really limited, even as a viewer. This looks awesome. Nicely done! I hope you keep at it!

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[–] sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 day 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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