alt Hacker NewsMy wife hit a wall trying to upload a hefty PDF - every “shrink” tool we tried barely compressed the size, and some even made it larger! Frustrated by the state of PDF compressors (looking at you, Adobe), I turned to LLMs - Claude, Deepseek, and Gemini came up short, but OpenAI’s o4-mini saved the day with a perfect solution. That inspired me to build pdfmini: a tiny, open‑source, client‑side HTML app that crushes PDF sizes right in your browser!!! No installs, no fees, zero privacy worries - all your data stays on your machine.
Try pdfmini now:
https://den-run-ai.github.io/pdfmini/
Source code for pdfmini:
This gave me an idea. You seem to be the right person to talk to.
Here is my workflow. Have a bunch of PDFs and images I need to combine.
I go to tools.PDF24.org, Merge pdfs, then compress them, then more compress them because of size limits, then add or remove pages. Then add page numbers.
These are multiple steps.
Could we have a way of defining these terms at start, either textual or no-code-like or something where we could define stuff like
Take input, merge > compress with greyscale, Max size 1MB, add page numbers on bottom right
Or
Convert input to jpg with image size 8cm by 8cm
I know many people who simply fail at such stuff. They just throw their hands up in defeat.
Not saying we should have llms do the job but if we could have multiple actions so that people could tell the software what they have in mind.
People dont just compress PDFs, often merge and then compress.
I recently say pdfux.com but it is not as featureful as PDF24 but PDF24 crashes a lot.