DEV Community: pdfreviewer

PDF Reviewer (3) - The Architecture

pdfreviewer — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 16:08:32 +0000

PDF Reviewer is a cloud-based service that enables users to annotate PDF files in Markdown syntax, with support for Latex Equations. It is a paid service with free trial (until Aug 31, 2022), but no credit card is needed for the trial. Readers are encouraged to check it out.

Internet services are not only simple web pages. There are some complex modules behind the scene. So is our service. Following is the architecture.

There're multiple components:

The Portal. It serves what visitors will see when they visit PDF Reviewer. It is built on top Angular 13.
The Viewer. It serves a PDF viewer which is built on top of the Mozilla PDF.js library. Another component is the PouchDB library, which we use to store annotations locally.
The Server. All the service code that backs the website. It is built on top of the famous Spring Boot framework.
The PostgreSQL database. It stores user session information, the credential token when users are authorized via the login button, and PDFs file information.
The Object Storage. It stores PDF files.
The Apache CouchDB server. It stores Annotation data.
The Google Account service. It is not a part of our service, but provides user credential management for our service.

PDF Reviewer (2) - Why is it built?

pdfreviewer — Sun, 03 Jul 2022 08:50:01 +0000

PDF Reviewer is a cloud-based service that enables users to annotate PDF files in Markdown syntax, with support for Latex Equations. It is a paid service with free trial(until Aug 31, 2022), but no credit card is needed for the trial. Readers are encouraged to check it out.

When I was reading academic papers or engineering books, I wished I had a PDF reader that can help make rich-format text annotations. I tried many tools, such as Adobe PDF reader, Microsoft Edge, etc. They're really good and helpful. They have so many features helping users navigate contents easily and fluently. But what I really wanted are two features:

Annotate PDFs in markdown, so I can freely use rich-format text annotations. More preferably, equations are supported.
View PDF files and annotations side-by-side.

I wanted the two features so much that I decided to build a service on my own. That's why PDF Reviewer came out. It doesn't have so many nice features like any other desktop-based PDF readers, but it has the missing two features.

PDF Reviewer (1) - What is it?

pdfreviewer — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 13:13:27 +0000

PDF Reviewer is a cloud-based service that enables users to annotate PDF files in Markdown syntax, with support for Latex. It is a paid service with free trial, but no credit card is needed for the trial. Readers are encouraged to check it out.

Main features include

Manage PDF files on cloud
View PDFs online
Annotate PDFs in Markdown syntax
Annotations are stored on cloud and synced across devices

Hello from pdfreviewer.com

pdfreviewer — Thu, 23 Jun 2022 13:49:16 +0000

Hello from pdfreviewer.com

Just to say Hi to everyone.

This will be a starting point from where we'll share some thoughts and ideas from the developers of website pdfreviewer.com.