I Built a PDF Toolkit With 50+ Tools Using Open-Source Software - Here's How
Source: Dev.to
About two years ago I posted PDFEquips on Hacker News and it hit the front page. The comments were fascinating—most of the discussion wasn’t about the tool itself, but about privacy, whether PDF processing belongs in the cloud, and why many online PDF tools feel like they’re trying to scam you. That feedback shaped everything I’ve built since.
Every online PDF tool I tried had the same problems: watermarks on free conversions, forced account creation for basic tasks, aggressive upsells, or sketchy ad‑filled interfaces. The underlying tech to do most PDF operations isn’t complicated—the problem was packaging. So I started building PDFEquips as a clean, browser‑based toolkit that does what you need without the friction.
The Stack
- Frontend: Astro.js with React and TypeScript. State management uses Redux, while file‑blob state is handled by Zustand for a cleaner pattern.
- Backend: Split between Node.js/Express and Python Flask for heavy PDF processing.
- Database: PostgreSQL stores user data and subscriptions.
- Deployment: Everything runs behind Nginx with PM2 and Gunicorn on a VPS.
Features
Translation Across Formats
Most PDF tools stop at conversion and merging. I wanted to add something I couldn’t find anywhere else—translating entire documents while preserving the layout. PDFEquips works across PDF, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, handling each format’s edge cases.
Demo: Translating a PDF document (video or GIF embed placeholder)
Bulk Web‑Page to PDF Conversion
A user asked if they could convert a list of web pages to PDF—not just one page, but hundreds. The solution:
- Paste URLs one by one into a textarea, or upload a CSV/TXT file.
- Set page size, margins, and orientation.
- Hit Convert.
Format Conversions That Actually Work
PDF → Excel
One of the most requested features was converting PDFs to editable formats without destroying the layout. Below is PDF‑to‑Excel in action:
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PDF → PowerPoint
Converting PDFs to PowerPoint while preserving slides, images, and text positioning:
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Try PDFEquips for Free
I’m a solo developer building this from scratch. Feel free to try it out and ask any technical questions.