feat(pdf-editor): a mark you placed is something you can still work on
Everything the editor put on a page was final. A text stamp could not be
corrected without deleting it and typing it again, nothing could be resized,
and the only way to remove a mark was a Delete key nobody had been told
about — the selection drew a dashed box and offered no action at all. Placing
a stamp also left its tool armed, so the next click stamped a second copy.
Marks are now editable objects. Selecting one gives it grab handles and a
small bar pinned above it: delete and duplicate for anything, and for text an
edit button, a size stepper and bold and italic. Double-clicking text reopens
it for rewriting in place rather than adding a second one. Placing a text
stamp or a signature drops straight back to the select tool with the new mark
live, which is both what people expect and what puts it immediately within
reach of a nudge.
Resizing is one function over every mark type rather than a special case per
kind: a handle drag produces a new bounding box, and the mark is mapped from
its old box into that one. Text scales by font size instead of stretching its
glyphs, signatures keep their aspect on a corner, and lines offer their two
endpoints instead of a box that would let you stretch them in ways you never
aimed at. A whole gesture lands on the undo stack as one step.
Selecting a thin mark used to mean clicking its outline exactly — about one
screen pixel. Each stroked mark now carries an invisible fat copy of itself
purely to catch the pointer.
New marks to go with it: underline and strike-through, which share the
highlight's text-selection geometry and differ only in where the rule sits; a
plain line; and a fill toggle for rectangles and ellipses. Bold and italic
mean three more Helvetica variants embedded at save time, since a PDF treats
them as separate fonts rather than as a style.
Double-click is detected from the pointer stream rather than from a dblclick
listener, because selecting a mark calls preventDefault() on the pointerdown
and that suppresses the compatibility mouse events the browser would have
synthesised the dblclick from.
2026-09-21 03:13:06 +02:00
{
"id" : "pdf-editor" ,
"name" : "PDF Editor" ,
feat(pdf-editor): convert a PDF to Word, and say what that costs
A PDF does not contain paragraphs. It contains glyphs with coordinates, and
there is no heading, no list, no table and no guaranteed reading order —
only runs of characters that happen to sit near each other. Converting to
Word means working out where the paragraphs were, from geometry. That
inference is the whole feature, and it is sometimes wrong, so this is called
a conversion and never an edit, and the dialog reports what it found before
anything is written.
Lines are grouped by baseline, runs joined with the spaces a PDF only implies
by leaving a gap, and paragraphs ended where the next line sits unusually far
below, is indented, or where the previous one stopped short of the measure.
Headings come from size relative to the body — which is the most common size
on the page, not the average, because a page of 11 pt under a 28 pt title
averages to something that is neither. Bold and italic come from the font's
name, the only place a PDF records them.
What it refuses to fake is as important. A page set in columns is reported,
not silently interleaved. A page with no text says so, and says why: it is an
image of writing, and reading that needs character recognition this editor
does not have. Tables become plain paragraphs rather than an invented grid,
because a wrong table is harder to repair than no table.
The .docx is written here rather than by a vendored builder: a Word file is a
zip of five XML parts, and the subset that can honestly be produced —
paragraphs of styled runs — is about two hundred lines. Vendoring a document
library would have added another megabyte on top of the four pdf.js and
pdf-lib already weigh, to generate markup we would still have to get right.
Entries are stored rather than deflated, which keeps a compressor out of the
add-on; the CRCs are the part that cannot be skipped, since Word calls the
file corrupt rather than naming the part that upset it.
Text replaced in place converts as replaced. Converting would otherwise hand
back the words the user had just edited away.
Checked by taking the output apart — every CRC verified, both XML parts run
through a real parser — and then, because that is still marking my own
homework, by opening the result in the Word editor extension, where mammoth
reads it with none of my code involved.
2026-09-22 22:06:54 +02:00
"version" : "0.3.0" ,
feat(pdf-editor): a mark you placed is something you can still work on
Everything the editor put on a page was final. A text stamp could not be
corrected without deleting it and typing it again, nothing could be resized,
and the only way to remove a mark was a Delete key nobody had been told
about — the selection drew a dashed box and offered no action at all. Placing
a stamp also left its tool armed, so the next click stamped a second copy.
Marks are now editable objects. Selecting one gives it grab handles and a
small bar pinned above it: delete and duplicate for anything, and for text an
edit button, a size stepper and bold and italic. Double-clicking text reopens
it for rewriting in place rather than adding a second one. Placing a text
stamp or a signature drops straight back to the select tool with the new mark
live, which is both what people expect and what puts it immediately within
reach of a nudge.
Resizing is one function over every mark type rather than a special case per
kind: a handle drag produces a new bounding box, and the mark is mapped from
its old box into that one. Text scales by font size instead of stretching its
glyphs, signatures keep their aspect on a corner, and lines offer their two
endpoints instead of a box that would let you stretch them in ways you never
aimed at. A whole gesture lands on the undo stack as one step.
Selecting a thin mark used to mean clicking its outline exactly — about one
screen pixel. Each stroked mark now carries an invisible fat copy of itself
purely to catch the pointer.
New marks to go with it: underline and strike-through, which share the
highlight's text-selection geometry and differ only in where the rule sits; a
plain line; and a fill toggle for rectangles and ellipses. Bold and italic
mean three more Helvetica variants embedded at save time, since a PDF treats
them as separate fonts rather than as a style.
Double-click is detected from the pointer stream rather than from a dblclick
listener, because selecting a mark calls preventDefault() on the pointerdown
and that suppresses the compatibility mouse events the browser would have
synthesised the dblclick from.
2026-09-21 03:13:06 +02:00
"description" : "Open a PDF in a full tab: read it, mark it up with highlight, underline, strike-through, pen, shapes, arrows, text and a drawn signature, then move, resize, restyle or delete anything you placed. Reorder, rotate or drop pages, fill in form fields, redact for real, and save a new copy. Marks are written into the saved file as real PDF content. The original is never touched." ,
"author" : "Silent Mode" ,
"icon" : "data:image/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciIHZpZXdCb3g9IjAgMCAyNCAyNCI+PHBhdGggZD0iTTYgMmg4bDYgNnYxMmEyIDIgMCAwIDEtMiAySDZhMiAyIDAgMCAxLTItMlY0YTIgMiAwIDAgMSAyLTJ6IiBmaWxsPSIjZGMyNjI2Ii8+PHBhdGggZD0iTTE0IDJ2Nmg2eiIgZmlsbD0iIzk5MWIxYiIvPjx0ZXh0IHg9IjEyIiB5PSIxNyIgdGV4dC1hbmNob3I9Im1pZGRsZSIgZm9udC1mYW1pbHk9InN5c3RlbS11aSwtYXBwbGUtc3lzdGVtLHNhbnMtc2VyaWYiIGZvbnQtc2l6ZT0iNS41IiBmb250LXdlaWdodD0iODAwIiBmaWxsPSIjZmZmIj5QREY8L3RleHQ+PC9zdmc+" ,
"main" : "index.js" ,
"capabilities" : [ "toolbar-menu" , "open-tab" , "context-menu-item" ] ,
"toolbar-menu" : {
"title" : "PDF Editor" ,
"icon" : "data:image/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciIHZpZXdCb3g9IjAgMCAyNCAyNCI+PHBhdGggZD0iTTYgMmg4bDYgNnYxMmEyIDIgMCAwIDEtMiAySDZhMiAyIDAgMCAxLTItMlY0YTIgMiAwIDAgMSAyLTJ6IiBmaWxsPSIjZGMyNjI2Ii8+PHBhdGggZD0iTTE0IDJ2Nmg2eiIgZmlsbD0iIzk5MWIxYiIvPjx0ZXh0IHg9IjEyIiB5PSIxNyIgdGV4dC1hbmNob3I9Im1pZGRsZSIgZm9udC1mYW1pbHk9InN5c3RlbS11aSwtYXBwbGUtc3lzdGVtLHNhbnMtc2VyaWYiIGZvbnQtc2l6ZT0iNS41IiBmb250LXdlaWdodD0iODAwIiBmaWxsPSIjZmZmIj5QREY8L3RleHQ+PC9zdmc+" ,
"items" : [
{ "id" : "open" , "label" : "Open a PDF…" }
]
} ,
"context-menu-items" : [
{
"id" : "open-link" ,
"label" : "Open PDF in editor" ,
"when" : "linkURL"
}
] ,
"updateURL" : "https://navigate.st/bns/theseus.x/extensions/pdf-editor/updates.json"
}
