r/pdf

I’ve sent multiple emails to PDFe to ask for a refund since I noticed they have taken £350 out of my account over the last few months, unauthorised. They aren’t replying by to my emails. Scam.

I have been working on a text to PDF tool(TextToPDFNet) mainly focused on clean output from raw text. The main idea was to fix messy formatting issues like broken lines uneven spacing and unstructured text before converting it into a proper PDF.

Now here’s the thing. I keep seeing AI features being added everywhere. Things like auto formatting structure detection and smart cleanup of extracted text.

But I am not really sure if people actually want that in PDF tools or if they just want something fast and accurate that works every time.

From your experience what matters more to you
Better text accuracy and formatting
Faster conversion
Or AI based features that try to improve the output automatically

I’ve been trying to unlock my password-encrypted PDFs lately, and most of the solutions I find online are web-based tools where you upload your PDF file and download the unlocked version instantly.

But honestly, I’m a bit concerned about the risks involved. The PDFs contain confidential information, and I’m not sure how reliable these online services really are. Like:

• Can they store or misuse my data?
• What if the file gets leaked or accessed by someone else?
• Are there any hidden malware or security threats?

Because of this, I started looking into offline solutions instead. I recently tried a desktop-based PDF unlocker, and it felt much safer since everything happens locally on my system without uploading files anywhere.

Still, I’m curious — what do you guys think?

Are online PDF unlock tools safe to use, or is it better to stick with offline software? Any experiences (good or bad)?

Hi all, I have a pdf file of a board game manual (The Night Cage: Shrieking hollow), that was made with a ton of transparent elements and some layers that behave like masks, to achieve certain visual effects. I am making a translation of the rules, and every time I touch the page and section titles, the whole thing breaks. The transparent design elements turn into monochrome boxes. I tried to convert to InDesign, but the conversion fails.

Does anybody know about some tools that would be able to edit it without breaking, or possibly the tool that created this?

The Pdf rulebook can be found here.

is there a free AI pdf checker out there to check if the document is AI generated ? (its a account balance pdf)

I need to OCR 50M PDF pages, they are in Dutch, French and German. Most are computer written text that was printed out and scanned in. Sometimes there's a stamp or a little hand writing, but it's not important to capture that information.

The aim would be to build a search engine on top of those PDFs. Not necessarily for AI, but just for humans to search PDFs based on the text in the PDFs.

I have a limited budget of less than 1k and would like to finish the job in under 4 days. I think most VLMs are probably too expensive to run at this scale with this budget?

Options I'm looking at: Tesseract, Paddle OCR, Surya OCR, Mindee DocTR, Rapid OCR, ...

So far I'm thinking of picking Rapid OCR with PP-OCRv5, but this seems optimized for Chinese so not sure if it will work well for my languages.

Some VLMs I'm looking at, but they will probably be too slow and expensive: LightOnOCR 2 1B, SmolVLM-256M, HunyuanOCR 1B, Docling Granite, ...

Do I run these models natively, or better to go with something like Docling, PyMuPDF4LLM, Marker, ... Or do these add a lot of overhead?

Any recommendations on how to run this in parallel?

Am I missing anything? Tips on how to build the search engine afterward?

I've been using Adobe Acrobat Pro for the past 4 years now on my MacBook Pro. Today I see this message when I opened Adobe Acrobat, what am I supposed to do? Can anyone advise? I clicked on Learn more and not much info was available there, it took me to apple's page with info not related to this.

https://preview.redd.it/czladseal2xg1.png?width=1508&format=png&auto=webp&s=9a5777e6074797085dfea883cc3c6f33b2660478

I’ve been trying different ways to extract data from invoices and PDFs, but most tools either:

• break when formats change
• struggle with multi-page tables
• or need a lot of manual correction

Curious how others are handling this in real workflows.

Are you still doing manual entry, or using some tools that actually work reliably?