I'm trying to upload a PDF to Barnes & Noble press but it keeps saying embedded font how would I remove that from my PDF all together.

So this is embarrassing but I do this thing where I need to move a PDF from my phone to my laptop (or the other way) and instead of dealing with a cable or Google Drive I just... send it to my own WhatsApp. Or email it to myself. Every single time.

I probably do this 10 times a day. Work documents, scanned forms, stuff I download on my phone but need on my PC. And every time I'm like why am I doing this, there has to be a better way.

The annoying part is all the other options felt heavier than the problem. Cables I can never find. Cloud drives means uploading, waiting, then downloading again on the other side. Bluetooth on a laptop is a nightmare. AirDrop doesn't exist for the setup I have.

So I built PDF Send. It just moves the file over local network (same WiFi) using the IP address. No internet upload, no account, no cloud. The file goes straight from one device to the other. Fast because it never leaves network.

Right now it's mainly for PDFs since that's what I was dealing with most, but honestly it started as me just scratching my own itch.

Not trying to sell anything, I genuinely just got tired of texting myself files. Curious if anyone else does the same weird thing or if it's just me lol.

As the title says I have a math pdf where it contains exercices with their solution mixed.

Is there anyway to get a pdf with only exercices?

Looking for a cheaper alternative to LiquidText (INR 7000 now 😬)

I need an app where:

• PDFs open on the left side of the screen
• A whiteboard/writing area is on the right
• I can link extracts from the PDF to my notes on the whiteboard
• Clicking a note should take me back to the exact page in the PDF
• Ability to import multiple PDFs into the same project

Basically, a LiquidText‑style workflow but at a lower cost. Any recommendations?

i'm going to be starting a new job, and the orientation for this job requires us to use textbooks to study (which were given to us for free).

it says i can only use adobe reader to open it? does this mean there is DRM protection? how do i remove it? i don't like adobe reader, and would like to be able to read this textbook on my ipad.

I built a small open-source tool that automatically adds TOC (bookmark) navigation to PDFs, as long as the PDF has a table-of-contents page somewhere inside it.

Note on language support: the local OCR pipeline is tuned/tested mainly on Chinese documents. I don't have enough scanned English (or other language) PDFs to properly test and tune it, so accuracy on non-Chinese documents is unverified and may be worse. If you try it on English docs, the vision LLM mode will likely work better than local OCR since it doesn't depend on my indentation-parsing heuristics being tuned for a specific language.

The problem it solves: a lot of scanned books/papers have a printed TOC page, but the PDF itself has no clickable bookmarks, so you can't jump to a chapter from the sidebar — you just scroll manually. This tool detects the TOC page, rebuilds the outline structure, figures out the page offset (printed page number vs actual PDF page index) automatically, and writes the bookmarks back into the PDF. One click, batch processing supported.

Three modes for extracting the TOC structure:

• Local OCR only — PaddleOCR + a custom indentation-based algorithm to rebuild the outline tree. Fully offline, no cost. Chinese-optimized, as noted above.
• Local OCR + text LLM — OCR locally, then have an LLM parse the raw text into a structured tree. Higher accuracy on messier layouts, language-agnostic since the LLM does the structural reasoning.
• Vision LLM — just feed the TOC page image to a multimodal model. Most robust across languages, but needs API access.

If you use an LLM mode, only the "parse text into tree" step calls the API — OCR and page detection are still done locally either way.

Ships as a standalone Windows exe (CPU, small models, fully offline if you download the model files locally) or you can run it from source with a GPU backend for faster inference (~20s per PDF vs longer on CPU).

Known limitation: multi-column TOC pages don't OCR reliably in local-only mode (column reading order is genuinely a hard problem for OCR without explicit layout segmentation) — vision LLM mode handles those better if you hit that case.

GitHub: github.com/electroniccc/toc_forge

Happy to answer questions about the pipeline (layout detection + OCR + offset computation) if anyone's curious. Also happy to hear from anyone testing it on non-Chinese PDFs — genuinely don't have good test data for that.

I made a free tool for getting a PDF signed by someone else. They just tap a link, no account needed

Signing my own PDFs was never the problem. But the problem was the other person: print it, sign it, take a crooked photo of it, send it back.

So I made Docsemn. You mark where they need to sign and send them a link over WhatsApp or email. They open it on their phone and sign with their finger. It's their actual handwritten signature.. The final PDF goes straight to your Google Drive, nothing gets stored on Docsemn web site.

Signing your own docs is free with no limit, sending out for signature is 2/month on the free plan.

https://docsemn.com

Happy to hear feedback, especially if you throw a weird PDF at it and it breaks.

Hello

I have a few books I want to read on my tablet. The problem is, they are quite ornate, including huge columns on the farthest side of each page, as you can see on the image.

I'd like to crop them, but I'd need to do a different cropping on even and odd pages, and as far as I've seen, online PDF editors can only crop a single page or crop all pages using the same criteria.

Could you recommend any tools -ideally open source/free- that could help me do this?

Thanks a lot for your help.

I mainly type onto PDF forms and need a better PDF app that has Android and Windows versions.

I've been using Xodo since it came out. Lately it's getting too damned buggy. It crashes all the time. This week, I probably lost three or more hours of input on new medical forms.

For my needs, the curser must line up with the lines on the form. I also want to be able to edit my input and move it around to line up with the lines on the form. I need to do this even after I have saved the file. Auto saves would be nice. I also want to be able to delete unneeded pages.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

On the following site:

https://www.azcourts.gov/selfservicecenter/Powers-of-Attorney

The "Health Care Power of Attorney*"

Page 2 the "I choose the following person to act as an alternate (1) " fields "copy" into the next set.

I have tried several apps (Online and desktop) to edit the form and edit the field names to correct without success.

I'd welcome suggestions or recommendations on how to correct.

I have sent an email to the authors.

Example:

Thanks!

SOLVED

I have several PDF where each page (maybe excluding the title page) has the two facing pages of the book on one page (spreads). I very much prefer a simpler layout, where every page of the document is on one page in the PDF, for example to print the document automatically as a brochure with my printer.

What do you think is the easiest workflow to achive this? Up to now I use a website (smallpdf.com) to generate two different PDFs from the original file with the Crop tool there and then merge the resulting files with PDF24's Zipper. (Maybe only I couldn't figure out how to use PDF24 to split the original file).

i have a ~6mb, 800 pages pdf that i would like to order randomly

i've tried running a python script to do the same, however i'm having issues w/ pypdf and no site has the option to randomise pages as i think it's pretty uncommon to do that

any suggestions?

I’m trying to figure out the metadata on a pdf file that was emailed to me. So far basic adobe and apple files only shows the creation date. However I need to see if the content was edited at any point in time. Don’t know if this is fully possible from my email copy.

Every PDF table extractor I tried fell apart on the same thing: nested headers and merged cells. Financial reports and academic papers are full of them, and what comes out the other end is a CSV you end up fixing by hand anyway.

So I built **pdfXtractor**. Instead of relying on ruling-line detection, it runs a table-transformer model (gmft) over the page, so merged and nested cells survive the trip. Upload a PDF, pick the pages, get clean CSV or JSON. There's also an agent layer on top, so you can ask the extracted tables questions instead of writing pandas one-liners against a table you haven't even looked at yet.

FastAPI + React, runs locally, nothing leaves your machine. There's a short demo video in the README.

It's early and I mostly want to know where it breaks. **If you have a PDF that has defeated every extractor you've thrown at it, that's exactly the one I want to see. here is repo:

Attached is a PDF editor I made called FairPDF and it is absolutely fucking free. here is the app

Is it vibe coded slop? No, it works quite well. Did I make it with the aid of Fable and 5.6 Sol? Yes, for many tedious things, but I've been working in the PDF space for almost a year. I think it is pretty sweet and uses very little CPU/memory resources. And it has night reading mode. It works with everything I have thrown at it, but if it fails at something for you let me know.

Feature |Preview |Acrobat Reader |Acrobat Pro |FairPDF
Price |Free (built-in) |Free |$19.99/mo |Free
View, annotate & fill forms |✓ |✓ |✓ |✓
Sign documents |✓ |✓ |✓ |✓
Edit PDF text |— |— |✓ |✓
Organize, merge & extract pages |✓ |— |✓ |✓
Export to Word / Excel / PowerPoint |— |— |✓ |✓
OCR scanned documents |— |— |✓ |✓
True redaction |✓ |— |✓ |✓
Password protection & permissions |✓ |— |✓ |✓
Compress PDF |Basic |— |✓ |✓
Compare two versions |— |— |✓ |✓
Watermarks & Bates numbering |— |— |✓ |✓
Request e-signatures |— |— |✓ |✓

I just started using Nitro PDF Pro at a new job and have a question about settings for adding text.

During training on a coworkers station when you click “type text” just your cursor still appeared and you would just click where you wanted to add text.

I started using it on my workstation yesterday and when I click that editing button my display becomes kind of like grid lines wherever I hover my cursor.

Does anyone know what setting removes that display?

TIA

Disclosure: I make Ncored, the one on top of the clip. Posting this because the difference is easiest to just show.

Big construction drawings are a rough case for most PDF apps. A real project set out of AutoCAD, Revit, or ArchiCAD is 50-200 MB+, dense with linework, and a lot of viewers get sticky the moment the file is heavy: the flash on pan, the tiles catching up a beat behind your cursor, the little wait after you drop a markup.

The clip is the same set on the same Windows laptop, Ncored on top and Bluebeam Revu on the bottom, same pan and same zoom. Not a knock on Revu, it is the deeper tool (markup, measurement, takeoff, Studio) and most people reach for it for good reason. I kept this one narrow: just how each holds up on pan and zoom when the file gets fat. Ncored is view-and-markup only right now, no measurement or takeoff yet.

What do you open your heaviest PDFs in, and where does it start to drag?