this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
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Hi everyone. Hope you are well. BentoPDF recently hit 10k stars on Github in just under 3 months of launch and I am very grateful to the community! ❤️

BentoPDF's new version has been released. And I had implemented some of the requested feature here such as: Digital Signing of PDFs and Validation along with Email to PDF support and Deskewing of PDF. I have attached the release note link with the post. Moreover the OCR feature now performs on par with OCRMyPDF.

The reason I am making this post is gain feedback on the existing features of Bento, but most importantly Bento is going to have a Desktop version soon. Initially it will be launched for Mac users. Bento is inherently fast, but browsers and wasm have limitations, and this aims to solve it with the use of native libraries and leverage the CPU for faster processing and handling of large files efficiently.

I want to know what is the feature you use the most or is there any feature you'd like to be done that existing PDF softwares don't do well. I am happy for any feedback! Thank you (:

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[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 10 points 18 hours ago (9 children)

Maybe I don't understand the use case for bentopdf, and considering how popular it is, that is likely true. However, I don't get what this does...

  • it's self-hosted, but the processing happens on the client? Is this just a local application?
  • it only works with PDF documents?
  • What advantage does bentopdf have over something like paperless ng?

Again, if this is obvious to most ppl, forgive me.

[–] alam@lemmy.world 19 points 18 hours ago (5 children)

Hello!

  1. Yes, its a local app
  2. Yes, it only concerns itself with PDF documents and conversions to and from PDF
  3. I have never used paperless so I am not really the best person to answer this, but I believe paperless is a document management system, and is designed for document ingestion and organization?

Bento on the other hand, is a full PDF Toolkit, that allows you to edit, compress, annotate, sign, redact, convert pdf to other formats and convert to pdf from other formats, converting pdf for ai ingestion etc. Basically everything related to PDFs. Hope that helps.

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (2 children)

With respect, help me out here...

I process PDFs all the time, both assembling text and images into PDFs and extracting images, text, layouts, etc. My uses are mostly cleaning up metadata and unwanted elements so they render correctly in more environments. I use pdftk and imagemagick for this, generally.

Is bentopdf just a nice GUI for tools like these?

I'm struggling to understand what part of bentopdf is "self-hosted".

[–] alam@lemmy.world 4 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Hello. BentoPDF does provide a GUI for operations like the ones you mentioned. However, the main goal of Bento was to bring capabilities that traditionally only exist in backend or native tools, such as Ghostscript, qpdf, LibreOffice, PyMuPDF, and similar stacks onto the web.

Beyond that, there are many workflows that don’t translate well to a CLI at all such as drag and drop merging and organization, visual page manipulation, form creation, cropping, annotations, and text editing. These are hard to do reliably or efficiently in a terminal, and not everyone uses or is comfortable working with CLI tools.

So all the processing happens in the browser and you get a local hostable, OS agnostic tool without needing native dependencies installed on the system. Hope that somewhat clears your doubt

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago

Fair enough, thanks for taking the time.

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