Hi /c/selfhosted,
I want to introduce PdfDing to this community. PdfDing is a PDF manager and viewer that you can host yourself. It offers a seamless user experience on multiple devices. It’s designed be to be minimal, fast, and easy to set up using Docker. The repo can be found here. Features include:
- Seamless browser based PDF viewing on multiple devices
- Dark Mode, colored themes and custom theme colors
- Inverted color mode for reading PDFs
- Remembers current position - continue where you stopped reading
- SSO support via OIDC
- Share PDFs with an external audience via a link or a QR Code
- Shared PDFs can be password protected and access can be controlled with a maximum number of views and an expiration date
- Automated and encrypted backups to S3 compatible storage
I would be very happy if you wold give PdfDing a try. If you like it, be sure to leave a star :)
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What is the use case for hosting this?
I can open any PDF on any computer, either locally, if the file is on the local filesystem, or via the internet, served using a simple web server and any filesharing system in-between.
You are right, there are solutions to for this, that are using the inbuilt PDF viewer of the browser. This works fine on desktops and laptops but on smartphones it will simply download the PDF file and not display it in the browser (at least it is like this on my mobile devices). This solution also does not allow you to continue reading where you stopped on another device.
I needed wanted other features on top:
- every user can upload files
- can be self-hosted via Docker
- minimal and resource-friendly
- SSO support
- Share PDFs with an external audience via a link or a QR Code. There should also be some kind of access control mechanism for the shared PDFs
So it’s kind of an ebook reader of sorts?
Yes, you could see it like that. I actually started developing PdfDing after I did not find any ebook reader that fulfilled all of my requirements.
What is the benefit over something like stirling-pdf?
PdfDing has a totally different use case than stirling-pdf. stirling-pdf is for manupilating PDF files, in contrast the PdfDing is for viewing and managing PdfFiles.
There are also self-hostable ebook readers, but they (at least the ones I have tried) don’t allow individual users to upload their own files. Usually there is an admin curating the content. Also sharing content with an external audience is difficult.
What’s up with changing to github?
I’ve been watching this one since it can support high availability but the biggest thing I see missing is support for indexing / searching documents.
I like the direction this has gone so far and excited to see how it continues!
What’s up with changing to github?
I answered this in another thread, so I just copy it here. I hope that’s okay.
I tried to make codeberg work, but it is really hard to gain traction and interaction with the community over there. For example, while I got 3 issues from the community on codeberg in over 5 months, on github I already got two in just two days. Of course it could be a coincidence or the same users as on codeberg.
I am developing PdfDing not only for myself but also as way to give back to the community for all the great projects I am using. So I want it to be used by many people. I want and need the interaction with the community. The issues I got until now were great feature requests that I would have not thought of on my own. Maybe I will also get contributors, would be great for sure.
but the biggest thing I see missing is support for indexing / searching documents.
I think it would be quite cool to have support for indexing / searching documents. I am not exactly sure how to do or to incorporate it but there should be a way :). For now it’s not on top of my to-do list as there are some core features I am still missing and want to finish first. Feel free to create an issue on GitHub.
Yeah that makes sense I didn’t mean in any aggressive way I guess codeberg is archived so that answers the question of what one to use for issues and such. I’ll put up a feature request on it. I do appreciate the work and have been watching it progress!
