Hi selfhosted community,

I am pleased to announce the release v1.5.0 of PdfDing. PdfDing is a selfhosted PDF manager, viewer and editor offering a seamless user experience on multiple devices. It's designed be to be minimal, fast, and easy to set up using Docker. You can find the repository here.

Important: Before updating, make sure to take a backup! The internal changes in this release are quite substantial and while everything is thoroughly tested, problems could still arise when performing the migrations.

The highlight of this release is the introduction of workspaces and collections. Compared to the already present tag system, they offer way greater flexibility and take the management of your PDFs to the next level. Implementing these features was quite the work as the changes required a lot of refactoring and rewriting of the existing logic. This resulted in over 70 new commits (out of a total 500), so this is by far the most for a single release. I am very pleased with the result and you hopefully too.

Furthermore, the popularity of the project keeps growing continually. We have now over 1500 Stars on github, almost 200k image pulls, over 80 forks and five contributors. Given that the project is quite niche I am still a bit blown away by this level of popularity. At the same time I am also happy that it's not too popular as it keeps the maintenance overhead manageable... Thanks for the support and onward to further organic and sustainable growth!

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[–] 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Serious question. I've seen a few posts now about self-hosting PDF managers. Why is this useful? Why not just open a PDF application when I need to work with PDF?

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago

    I have lots (100s?) of pdfs for ttrpg rules collected over years - storing in folders is enough to separate by game, but fails when a single book is a mix of content - does it go in the adventure, character options or DM folder?

    Having a nice UI with tags and searching would help to organise the collection a lot better.

    Accessing all of that across any of my devices while the files actually live on my NAS would a be a big improvement - its easy for my laptop & tablet to get out of sync etc

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago

    This looks great - thanks for all your efforts! :)

    I plan to setup a service to better wrangle all of my many ttrpg PDFs soon and this will definitely be in the mix.

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  • 6 comments in c/selfhosted@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Nice!

    For someone unfamiliar, can you explain why someone would host PDFs? Are there any organisations that already do this?

    Also, what would be the difference between this and pdf.js (e.g. Firefox viewer) when it comes to the viewer?

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 1 year ago

    In short: Managing and consuming PDFs seamlessly on multiple devices. You can continue reading on your mobile device were you stopped reading on your laptop. I started implementing the app as there was no other app that satisfied my requirements:

    • Complete control over my data.
    • Easy to self-host via docker.
    • Lightweight and minimal, should run on cheap hardware
    • Continue reading where you left off on all devices
    • Browser based
    • Support single sign on via OIDC in order to leverage an existing identity provider
    • PDFs should be shareable with an external audience with optional access control
    • Open source
    • Content should not be curated by an admin instead every user should be able to upload PDFs via the UI

    Surprisingly, there was no solution available that could do this. In the following I’ll list the available alternatives and how they compare to my requirements.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    That goes straight into my bookmarks! I’ll look into this later but it looks very nice and promising.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Nicee!! Happy for ya, and for everyone else using your solution

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Ooh, does anyone know of something like this which can show 3 pages at once?

    Thinking of replacing the music app on an old mac mini and using a hdmi stick/pi to display it instead.

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