PdfDing

PdfDing is a selfhosted PDF manager, viewer and editor offering a seamless user experience on multiple devices.

Introduction

PdfDing is a PDF manager, viewer and editor that you can host yourself. It offers a seamless user experience on multiple devices. It's designed be to be minimal, fast, and easy to set up using Docker.

The name is a combination of PDF and ding. Ding is the German word for thing. Thus, PdfDing is a thing for your PDFs. Inspired by linkding.

Live Demo

Try PdfDing on the demo instance: https://demo.pdfding.com

This is a temporary live demo with shared user accounts, all data will be deleted every 60 minutes.

Features

• Seamless browser based PDF viewing on multiple devices. Remembers current position - continue where you stopped reading
• Stay on top of your PDF collection with multi-level tagging, starring and archiving functionalities
• Edit PDFs by adding annotations, highlighting and drawings
• Clean, intuitive UI with dark mode, inverted color mode and custom theme colors
• SSO support via OIDC
• Share PDFs with an external audience via a link or a QR Code with optional access control
• Markdown Notes
• Progress bars show the reading progress of each PDF at a quick glance

Screenshots

Screenshots can be found here.

Getting started

Using Docker

To install PdfDing using Docker you can just run the image from Docker Hub:

docker run --name pdfding \
    -p 8000:8000 \
    -v sqlite_data:/home/nonroot/pdfding/db -v media:/home/nonroot/pdfding/media \
    -e HOST_NAME=127.0.0.1 -e SECRET_KEY=some_secret -e CSRF_COOKIE_SECURE=FALSE -e SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE=FALSE \
    -d \
    mrmn/pdfding:latest

If everything completed successfully, the application should now be running and can be accessed at http://127.0.0.1:8000.

If you use selinux it might be necessary to add the :Z after the volumes, e.g. sqlite_data:/home/nonroot/pdfding/db:Z.

Using Docker Compose

To install PdfDing using Docker Compose, you can use one of the files in the compose directory and run e.g.:

docker-compose -d -f compose/sqlite.docker-compose.yaml

Using Helm

PdfDing can be deployed on Kubernetes using the provided helm chart. To add the PdfDing helm repository, run:

helm repo add pdfding https://charts.pdfding.com

To install the PdfDing helm chart with a release name my-release in ns namespace, run:

helm install -n ns --create-namespace my-release pdfding/pdfding

Guides

Guides about various aspects of PdfDing can be found in the guides section of the docs.

Configuration

Information about the different configuration options can be found in the configuration section of the docs.

Contributing

Small improvements, bugfixes and documentation improvements are always welcome. If you want to contribute a larger feature, consider opening an issue first to discuss it. I may choose to ignore PRs for features that don't align with the project's goals or that I don't want to maintain.

If you are interested in contributing more information can be found in the development section of the docs.

Comparison with Stirling PDF

While Stirling PDF and PdfDing are both self-hosted web applications centered around PDF files, they still differ in their use case. Stirling PDF focuses on performing various operations like splitting, cropping and rotating on your PDFs. PdfDing however has a different focus, it is all about reading and organizing your PDFs. All features are added with the goal of improving the reading experience or making the management of your PDF collection simpler. PdfDing's editing functionalities were added with the same idea in mind. You can add annotations, highlighting and drawings to PDFs, so that you can highlight or add information that will be beneficial to your reading experience.

Acknowledements

• This project started by adjusting the django starter of Andreas Jud: django-starter, django-starter-assets
• As mentioned above, inspired by linkding.