// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
BentoPDF Handles PDFs Locally, So You Don’t Have to Upload Them to Websites
There are plenty of online PDF tools that let you edit documents without installing anything on your computer. You just open a website, upload your file, make the changes, and download the edited document.
But there is a catch. You are handing your files over to a third-party service, and you may not always know how it handles your data. Some services may have questionable privacy practices, while others are outright malicious.
In fact, the FBI has warned people about fraudulent online file converters that steal sensitive information and spread malware in the past.
These tools scrape uploaded files for personal details, banking information, email addresses, and passwords, making them particularly risky when dealing with confidential work documents that should've never left an organization's secure environment.
BentoPDF is an open source alternative that advertises itself as a privacy-first tool that processes files directly in your browser instead of uploading them to a server, helping avoid some of the aforementioned privacy risks associated with online PDF tools.
Created by Alam, a developer out of India, BentoPDF traces its origins to an internal tool that was being used for merging and splitting PDFs. Soon after its creation, the lead dev decided to share his work with the world via Reddit, and a few weeks later the code was live on GitHub.
BentoPDF uses WebAssembly, which lets heavy programs run right inside your browser. Its OCR tool, for instance, runs on Tesseract.js, a port of the Tesseract OCR engine. That way, the processing happens on your computer, and nothing is uploaded to a server.
The project is dual-licensed, where the code is provided under the AGPL-3.0, making it free to use and open for anyone looking to fork it. A separate commercial license is available for closed-source use and costs $79 as a one-time purchase.
Alam also publishes two other open source projects, Hyper Compress and Kura. The first is a PDF compression engine, while the latter converts PDFs to standards like PDF/A and PDF/UA.
Anyhow, coming back to the PDF editor, I took it for a test run on Vivaldi, a Chromium-based browser, covering a few tools to see how it holds up in everyday use.