Hey devs! I recently launched a side-project called GoPDFTools, and I thought it would be fun to share how and why I built it.
👉 Live here: https://gopdftools.io/?ref=devto
It’s a fast, lightweight set of PDF & image utilities that run 100% client-side using JavaScript and WebAssembly. No servers. No storage. No tracking. Everything happens directly in your browser.
🧱 The Problem I Wanted to Solve
Most online PDF tools force users to upload files to a backend server. That leads to:
- Slow conversions
- Privacy concerns
- File size limits
- Annoying ads
- Rate limits or “premium” prompts
For something as simple as merging PDFs or converting JPG to PDF, this felt unnecessary — especially when modern browsers are more than capable of handling it locally.
So I decided to build a privacy-first version powered by client-side processing.
💡 No Backend
Everything runs offline.
The backend = your browser.
🛠️ What the Tool Can Do
Right now GoPDFTools supports:
- Convert Images → PDF
- Compress JPG/PNG locally
- JPG → PDF
- PNG → PDF
- Merge PDFs
- Split PDFs
- Compress PDFs
- Delete/Reorder PDF pages
- PDF → JPG
All done entirely client-side.
🧪 Try it Out
🔗 https://gopdftools.io/?ref=devto
Would love for you to try it and let me know:
Speed improvements?
Browser compatibility issues?
Feature requests?
WASM optimization ideas?
I’m already working on more tools and improvements — and I’d love the DEV.to community’s input.
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