The Next Step For BentoPDF

Hello friends!

BentoPDF started as a small project that I used to work on in my free time and has grown into something I am incredibly proud of. Today, I want to share a personal goal of working on BentoPDF full-time.

I've been building this solo, thanks to your amazing support. But to truly realize the vision of BentoPDF, building a full-fledged PDF text editor engine and a complete Office engine right in the browser,I need your help. These are massive, complex engineering challenges that will transform BentoPDF into the only PDF toolkit you'll ever need.

To make this sustainable and potentially hire another developer to speed things up, I am aiming to raise $3,000/month in sponsorship. This would allow me to dedicate to making this tool better for you, free and open-source forever.

If BentoPDF has helped you, saved you time, or saved you money, please consider supporting this journey.

👉 Sponsor on GitHub | Buy me a Coffee

And if you can't contribute, that is completely okay! Your stars, shares, and kind words mean the world to me. Thank you for being part of this incredible journey. Now let's get on to the release notes ❤️

Fun Fact: BentoPDF was about to be called JollyPDF before it's release.

Dad Joke of the Release

Why don't skeletons fight each other? They don't have guts! 🤣

Release Notes v1.15.1

1. Office to PDF Support

• Now supports converting Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents to PDF.
• Added support for OpenOffice formats: ODT, ODS, ODP, and ODG.
• Added support for other document formats: .pages, .pub, .vsd, and .psd.
• Added support for RTF and CSV to PDF conversion.

2. PDF to Office Conversion

• PDF to Word: Convert your PDFs back to editable Word documents.
• PDF to Excel: Convert PDFs to Excel spreadsheets.

3. Improved Compression Tool

• Condense Algorithm: The vector algorithm has been replaced with "Condense". This is now the recommended method. It performs on par with or surpasses commercial solutions while preserving all interactivity and selectable text.
• Photon Algorithm: Use this for image-heavy PDFs where interactivity is not required. It will outperform commercial solutions.

4. Enhanced Image Support

• Images to PDF: Now supports a massive variety of formats: JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF, TIFF, PNM, PGM, PBM, PPM, PAM, JXR, JPX, JP2, PSD, SVG, HEIC, and WebP.
• JPG to PDF: Added support for JPEG2000 formats (JPX, JP2).
• PDF to SVG: Convert PDF pages to scalable vector graphics.
• PDF to CSV: Extract data into CSV format.

5. Markdown & Text Tools

• Markdown to PDF: A full live split-pane converter supporting CommonMark and GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM). Note: External images won't work because of CORS policy. Its recommened to embed base64 images or if you want to use it via url then 'Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy': 'credentialless' in vite.config.ts.
• PDF to Markdown: Convert PDFs to markdown while retaining headings and embedded images.
• Text to PDF: Updated to support all text types with proper RTL support for languages like Arabic and Urdu.

6. E-book & Comic Book Formats

• Added support for converting EPUB, MOBI, CBR, CBZ, FB2, and XPS files to PDF.

7. Data Extraction & AI Ready

• Prepare for AI: Output LLM-ready JSON from your PDF for easy ingestion by AI models.
• Extract Tables: Extract tables from PDF and export them as JSON, Markdown, or CSV.
• PDF to Text: Super fast text extraction for digital PDFs.
• Extract Images: Extracts all images while retaining their original native format.

8. Advanced PDF Tools

• PDF to PDF/A: Supports conversion to PDF/A-1b, PDF/A-2b, and PDF/A-3b standards (2b is recommended).
• Rasterize PDF: Rasterizes PDF pages into images with full DPI and output control.
• PDF Booklet: Create booklet layouts.
• Rotate Tool: The tool has been split into two: "Rotate by 90 degrees" and "Rotate by any angle".
• OCG Support: Added comprehensive support for Optional Content Groups (Layers). Features include viewing, editing, renaming, adding new OCGs, and toggling visibility on/off.

9. Fixes & Improvements

• Docker Fixes: Resolved Nginx configuration issues for serving WASM files and added subdirectory support.
• SharedArrayBuffer: Added security headers to enable advanced features in Docker environments.
• Icons: We are going to be migrating to Phosphor Icons. The Homepage tools icons have now been replaced with it

New Contributors ❤️

• Our PDF Editor now is fully offline thanks to the work of @EmeraldPi in #235

• fix: Absolute paths for logo and favicons by @hemantapkh in #262

• Fix: EmbedPDF package runner broken from v2 change by @EmeraldPi in #300

• Documentation for static website hosting of BentoPDF by @larryclaman in #307

New Contributors

• @EmeraldPi made their first contribution in #235
• @hemantapkh made their first contribution in #262
• @Stephan-P made their first contribution in #293
• @larryclaman made their first contribution in #307

As always, please test and report any issues.

Note

This was the biggest release for BentoPDF. Not only because of the amount of tools, but because I had to port PyMuPDF and Ghostscript to WASM. This was the first time I had heard my Macbook's fan's spin up and that too louder than my gaming pc lol.

BentoPDF will continue to refine these tools and add even more capabilities! Thanks for using BentoPDF and happy weekend! ❤️

Special Thanks to LibreOffice, PyMuPDF and Ghostscript for their open source tools, and making this possible.

Full Changelog:
v1.11.2...v1.14.0

v1.15.0...v1.15.1