Lions traditionally used ghostscript to convert a PDF to images. It's now considered pretty germane. For a pure browser program, the internet recommends PDF.js
https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js
A few chatgpt prompts can create a quick demo of how to draw text on a PDF. For editing, you want the PDF in a persistent canvas & all the text in another canvas, with the 2 composited in 1 step. Then, the user can alter a text element without redrawing the PDF & every other text element.
The next trick was reading a goog sheet. There's a diabolical process to get a service account key. Then a GPT demo using curl was a fail. GPT can generate another solution using node.js. They generally involve many steps to create an API key & download an access token. Helas, the GPT says accessing a goog sheet directly from a web app requires making the sheet public.
At best, it would require hard coding the service account key in the javascript or a javascript include, but if curl can supposedly access it, a very simple web server on another port could just do spreadsheet queries with its own copy of the service account key. Any solution is going to require a simple python webserver in that case.
The glaring problem is any insertion or deletion in the spreadsheet won't be reflected in the PDF overlay. It's almost easier to make a spreadsheet program from scratch. There are so many javascript spreadsheet programs, it might be a favorite toy problem of programmers. Helas, they vary in features & bugs.
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Processing PDF files in the browser using JavaScript is quite an interesting topic. Thank you for the informative post. I'd also like to share a great online service that recently helped me a lot when working with text files. With the help of https://pdfguru.com/split-pdf I easily and without any hassle split the PDF file into several separate ones. It was very convenient and took very little time. Also, I want to note that this PDF maker works online on all platforms and doesn't require any additional setup, so feel free to use it, I think it will be useful to many.
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Thanks for sharing!
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