Alternatives
Products that do what PDF annotation /w screenshot exporter using Chrome Headless and PDF.js does
I banged this out over the weekend. It's really rough though. https://github.com/burtonator/pdf-annotation-exporter Basically I have it working with: https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/web/viewer.html Whereby I can paste the pos.js into the console and it can export PDF annotations with screenshots of the annotation. I intend on using this with Anki to read more complex books and take notes with it. Now I just need to wire it all together with chrome headless and PDF.js
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Hi HN, Nick here. We're super excited to officially launch PDF.js Express [1]. PDF.js Express wraps a modern React UI around the PDF.js rendering engine to enable PDF annotation, form filling, and signing inside your web app. We've also made some improvements to PDF.js text search, and taken a different approach to how the viewer uses the PDF.js rendering API, resulting in sharp graphics at any zoom magnification [2]. Based on our research, more than 70% of those who try to implement these features on top of PDF.js find it too difficult or time-intensive [3]. For those who are successful,…
2020
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2017 · apify.com
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2017 · github.com
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Hello HN! It kept surprising me how much of a hassle it is to generate a PDF with decent HTML5 rendering from my SaaS apps. I tried several free libs and APIs but ended up with botched rendering a lot of times. So I set out to simplify this chore by creating an AWS hosted HTML to PDF conversion API that's based on Chrome. This API will allow a dev to just send the HTML to our API and get a PDF in response without having to worry about running and managing Chrome somewhere in their infra. I just finished the first version of my landing page and hosted pdf generation API…
2018
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Here's a neat hack I made recently to do basic PDF editing directly in a browser—without having to upload anything to a server. I was initially looking for a way to do simple PDF modification (extracting pages, merging, and adding page numbers). There are some good server-side tools for this (QPDF, PDFTk, PDFBox, iText, Hummus), but for better speed and privacy I really wanted a 100% client-side solution. There are a few good JavaScript PDF libraries for reading and displaying PDFs (pdf.js) and creating PDFs from scratch (jsPDF, PDFKit), but I couldn't find any for editing existing PDFs. So,…
2018
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Hey HN, I built a REST API for capturing screenshots and generating PDFs from URLs. Why: I got tired of managing Puppeteer/Playwright in production. Memory leaks, zombie processes, Docker issues. So I wrapped it in an API. Stack: - Node.js + Fastify - Playwright (more stable than Puppeteer in my experience) - Self-hosted on Hetzner Features: - Screenshots: PNG, JPEG, WebP - PDFs: A4, Letter, custom sizes - Full-page capture, custom viewports - Cookie consent auto-accept - Lazy-load handling API example: curl -X POST…
Dec 2025 · screencraftapi.com
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