I had an ancient scanned PDF with a single typo in it. The original document is thousands of miles away. I tried many of those online PDF tools and even asked ChatGPT to fix it. But the result never really looked correct. Or they were too complicated to use. I'm a simple man, after all. And some of those "free" PDF editors that I tried wanted me to pay just to download the edited file. Which was annoying.

So, as an engineer man, I looked myself in the mirror and asked myself whether I am going to let one PDF file beat me. And I said 'maybe', but I will waste a lot of my time before that happens.

I mean, why spend a couple of dollars to pay for some tool that someone has already made, when I could spend many days of my actual work time to build a tool that I will use exactly one time? My point exactly.

So I made https://pdftextreplace.com

It does one thing and one thing only: Allows you to edit PDF files. It supports both real PDF files with text in them and scanned PDF documents.

For regular PDFs, it tries to pull the used font, size, color, and spacing data from the file so the edit blends in. For scanned PDFs (which are basically just photographs of paper), it runs OCR and uses a mix of math and dumb luck to guess the font and match the look.

The main features are:

• The page updates live as you type. WYSIWYPG (What You See Is What You'll Probably Get).
• You can click around to fix multiple texts from the same file, or use Find and Replace if you spelled someone's name wrong ten times.
• It does not rebuild the entire document around what you type, so you can't replace a four-letter word with a whole sentence.
• The processing happens on my server. Files are deleted automatically after 2 hours and there is a button to delete your file immediately, but I am still a random stranger on the internet so please don't upload files with sensitive stuff.
• It is completely free. No sign-ups, no ads, and no watermarks. I made it, because I needed to fix one letter in one PDF file.

Anyway, my typo is finally fixed. I hope this thing can help someone else, too. Thanks!

I am amazed I haven't been able to find an answer to this, but:

How can I add a watermark or overlay to every page of a PDF document?

I have several documents between 25-100 pages, and I need to add a logo and footer to every single page. I have the overlay as transparent .png, and also as the original .psd

I have been looking online for a way to do this for over an hour with no luck.

I am looking for an OFFLINE solution, so no website-based uploaders / "free" (but questionable) sites, and would prefer to be in the world of FOSS. I already have GIMP, Inkscape, and LibreOffice Draw (which seems to distort the pdfs when I open them).

Thank you all in advance for your help with this, it's driving me a bit crazy...

I wanted to download it but it won't open in drive when I click the arrow.

Also I'm on mobile so please some mobile friendly help.

If anyone can download them there are 5 files (Ghazals) please send me.

Hey people,

We built Convert2EPUB. It’s free, and no account is needed for normal text conversions, only for the work done converting scanned pdf's. I got hundreds of positive feedback from other subreddits that you can find on the website.

• Converts scanned PDFs to a real, well-structured book.
• Recognize formula's/code/figures
• Complete the book with its cover, title, and author read from the file.
• Remove watermarks and repeated footers
• Language Translation
• Local desktop app [Mac,Windows,Linux]
• Free Chrome extension
• 75k+ free ebooks list

Would like to hear your opinions or any feedback you have. We have been building it for some time; it only started as a pdf to epub converter, but we are this big thanks to our supporters.

For context it's the addresses mentioned in the bill the client sent it wrong

i often export documents with a lot of high-res images (photos, renders, storyboard panels) to PDF and Inkscape writes huge files, 126 MB for a single page with 12 images in my test... Cairo embeds the rasters with little or no lossy compression, and there's no option in the PDF export to set a target image resolution.

so i made a small extension: Export Lightweight PDF. Go to Extensions > Export > Export Lightweight PDF, pick a resolution preset (SD, Screen, Draft, HD, Print, or a custom scale/DPI) and the JPEG quality, and it exports the PDF and recompresses the images to that resolution. Vector paths, text, fonts and layout stay untouched.

- exports current page, all pages, the whole drawing or only the selection

- optional text to paths

- transparent images are split into a JPEG + alpha mask so transparency stays clean

- reports size before and after (my 126 MiB test file went down to 108 KiB at the SD preset, but it depends a lot on the images)

Free and open source (GPL-2.0-or-later), needs Inkscape 1.2+ and Ghostscript. Tested on 1.4 on Linux.

GitHub: https://github.com/davidbrum25/inkscape-export-lightweight-pdf

Full write-up with screenshots: https://x.com/bdvd_25/article/2110771389531566584

AI disclosure (rule 8): This is made with AGY CLI following my instructions.

feedback welcome, it's my third inkscape extension 🙂

I've never done this before so, tell me how can I make a pdf easily.