What PDF operations do you wish you could do in Claude?

[silverstein]

We just shipped v0.6.0 with merge, split, rotate, and reorder — the most-requested PDF operations. Now we want to hear from you: what's next?

PDF Tools has 369K+ installs and handles viewing, form filling, merging, splitting, rotating, reordering, bulk processing, extraction, and OCR. All locally on your computer — nothing uploaded.

What would make PDF Tools more useful for you?

Some ideas we're considering:

• PDF compression — reduce file size without losing quality
• Visual page manager — drag-and-drop to reorder, select ranges visually
• Smart operations — "split by chapter," "merge in chronological order"
• PDF comparison — side-by-side diff of two documents
• Watermarks & stamps — add text/image overlays
• Page extraction — pull specific pages into a new PDF
• Something else?

How to respond

Drop a comment with:

1. What you'd use (from the list above or your own idea)
2. How often you'd use it (daily, weekly, occasionally)
3. What you currently do instead (web tool, Adobe, skip it entirely)

Even a one-liner helps. We're building what you actually need, not what we think is cool.

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PDF Tools is maintained by Open Document Alliance. Star the repo if you find it useful!

[Altoh5]

If this can export PDF slides to Powerpoint, with the text in them being editable , that'll be great.
Here's a use case. Currently , i use NotebookLm to create slides. The downloaded slides (pdf or powerpoint) text are not editable. I have to use a step to go a tool like Canva to make the text editable for each slide and then export. I created a skill to do that , but it is slow using playwright.

If this tool can make the text in pdf editable and exported to powerpoint, it'll be great.

For your list, these 3 would be great
PDF compression — reduce file size without losing quality
Visual page manager — drag-and-drop to reorder, select ranges visually
PDF comparison — side-by-side diff of two documents

[silverstein]

Thanks for being the first to respond! 🎉

The PDF → PowerPoint with editable text idea is really interesting — that's a workflow pain point we hadn't considered. The NotebookLM → Canva → editable slides pipeline sounds tedious.

Quick follow-up: when you say "editable text," do you need the exact visual layout preserved (fonts, positioning, colors), or is it more about getting the text content into slide-shaped text boxes that you can then restyle?

And noted on compression, visual page manager, and comparison — all strong candidates. Thanks for the input!

[Altoh5]

thanks.
When i say "editable text," yes, i need the exact visual layout preserved (fonts, positioning, colors), and that's where the Canva Magic Grab Text works well. Sometimes the slides notebooklm produces can be in sketch form or some nice art form, and you want to preserve that.
The point is to be able to correct some of the words that it gets wrong or we may want to add to it.
Try it out and you'll know. There are a number of youtubers putting out content explaining this exact process to make notebooklm infographics and slides editable in Powerpoint. Yea, so i created a skill but it take 4 times as long as i were to do it manually, haha.

[silverstein]

v0.7.0 just shipped! 🎉

Based on your feedback (and others'), we just released v0.7.0 with:

Visual Page Manager — a new "Manage Pages" mode in the PDF viewer. See all your pages as thumbnails, drag to reorder, click to rotate, mark pages for deletion, then save as a new file. All local, all in Claude.

AI Page Analysis — Claude can now analyze your PDF pages to find blank backs, sideways pages, and potential duplicates. Ask Claude to "clean up this PDF" and it'll suggest which pages to remove or rotate.

New tools: apply_page_plan and get_page_analysis

Release: https://github.com/Open-Document-Alliance/PDF-Tools/releases/tag/v0.7.0

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Re: your PDF-to-PowerPoint request — that's a bigger feature we're tracking for a future release. The exact layout preservation you described (fonts, positioning, colors from NotebookLM slides) is the hard part. We hear you on the use case and it's on our radar. If anyone else wants this, react to this comment so we can gauge demand.

For compression, visual page manager (✅ shipped!), and comparison — those are all in the pipeline. Keep the feedback coming!