PDF Assembler – client-side PDF editing
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,…
PDF Assembler – client-side PDF editing launched on April 13, 2018 with 25 votes, #754 of 2,753 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches.
In plain words
PDF Assembler is a browser-based tool for basic PDF editing tasks like extracting pages, merging documents, and adding page numbers. All processing happens locally on the user's device with no server uploads required, prioritizing speed and privacy. It works by leveraging existing PDF reading libraries to disassemble files and reassemble them after modifications, making it useful for anyone needing simple PDF manipulation without relying on online services.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
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…
Does a similar job
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