Sooner or later it happens: a landlord, an insurer, a school, or your accountant asks for "everything in one PDF," and the photos in question are iPhone HEIC files sitting on your Mac. macOS reads HEIC natively — which is nice — but turning a batch of them into a single clean PDF still takes a few…
I've been building PillarChart — live under the product name BaZi Chart — a small site that turns a birth date, time and place into a BaZi (Four Pillars) chart, shows every step of the calculation, and offers optional one-time PDF reports. BaZi isn't rare on the English web. What I wanted was…
Plenty of PDF tools say your files stay on your device. You can check that yourself in a couple of minutes, with the browser you already have and a throwaway test file. Check 1: watch the Network tab Open the tool's page. Press F12 (Cmd+Option+I on a Mac) and click the Network tab. Chrome, Edge and…
A few months ago I got annoyed at the state of free PDF tools: upload your file, wait, download it back, hope nobody kept a copy. So I built an alternative where uploading is architecturally impossible - every tool runs client-side in the browser. The stack (total hosting cost: $0): Next.js on…
You photograph ten receipts, combine them into a PDF, and send the result to a colleague. The file opens. Every receipt is visible. Then your colleague searches for a supplier name and finds nothing. Nothing necessarily went wrong with the conversion. The PDF may simply contain images of text…
Disclosure: I work on SelectPdf, the library used in this article. It's a commercial library with a free Community Edition; both are covered at the end. If you've ever generated PDFs from HTML in a Linux container, you probably know the drill: a headless browser needs a long list of shared…
A legal team once sent my PDF-to-Markdown converter a 40-page services contract. Every desktop reader opened it fine. My converter threw File has not been decrypted . I assumed corruption. It wasn't. PDFs carry two independent passwords: a user password, needed to open the file, and an owner…
TL;DR: Most compliance programs are still a once-a-year document-gathering sprint, screenshots, spreadsheets, manual evidence collection. That model breaks the moment you're juggling more than one framework (GDPR, SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, HIPAA, regional rules like NESA/SBP) at once, which most…
After trying three PDF extractors on the same damaged notice, I still did not have the Chinese text I needed. The outputs looked different, but none contained the original Chinese title. That distinction matters when I am deciding whether another dependency is worth adding to a small tool. A…
A PDF extraction failure becomes harder to investigate when the fallback result replaces the first output. You eventually have readable text, but cannot tell which page needed help or where the replacement came from. I tested a small recording approach using controlled PDF samples. The useful…
