alam00000 Release Notes

A note

Hey everyone! Hope you are well.

The past few weeks I've been working on reducing BentoPDF's third-party library dependencies. Going forward, the core PDF stack will be just three libraries: pdf-lib.js, qpdf, and PDFium. Progress has been solid so far.

I also fell deep into a rabbit hole with PDF compression, and I think I've landed something genuinely interesting: better raw compression than Ghostscript, while preserving PDF fidelity. I'll be open sourcing it soon after more testing, and it'll become BentoPDF's core compression engine.

More updates coming shortly!

What's Changed

• Multi-tool: drag-and-drop for PDFs and images.

The PDF multi-tool now accepts both PDF and image files via drag-and-drop

• Split PDF Refactor

This fixes a long-standing size problem: when a PDF shared resources (fonts/images) across pages, extracting just a few pages could produce a file nearly as large as the original.

The single "Download as ZIP" checkbox conflated what you get with how it is packaged. It is replaced by a clear choice: Single combined PDF vs One PDF per range/page and ZIP packaging is now applied automatically whenever more than one file is produced.

What's More

fix(md to pdf): restore mermaid flowchart node labels. Fixes #738 by @mondeep31 in #739 ❤️

chore(i18n): add Slovak language by @marek-mraz in #737 ❤️

build(deps-dev): bump vite from 8.0.9 to 8.0.10 by @dependabot[bot] in #730

New Contributors

@mondeep31 made their first contribution in #739 ❤️

@marek-mraz made their first contribution in #737 ❤️

Full Changelog: v2.8.5...v2.8.6

Thank you for using BentoPDF. Going forward there will be a lot of new changes and interesting features that have been lined up. Have a great weekend! ❤️

Dad Joke Of the Release

What's the easiest building to lift? A lighthouse 🤣

(This release is later than I would have liked. The past few weeks I've been under the weather and pretty burnt out, so v2.8.5 sat finished for longer than it should have. Thanks for being patient ❤️)

What's Changed

• Custom Rotate
  Improved angle input handling, rotation utilities, and a smoother UX for fine-grained rotation. Thanks to @quhxl for the contribution.

• Alternate & Mix Pages
  Alternate and mix pages are now in workflow builder. Fixes #684

• Helm Chart Auto Update
  Helm chart version now auto updates with each release. Fixes #680

• New Option in Merge
  By default merge tool used to keep Keep original page labels from each file intact. Now users have the option to opt out from it via a checkbox. Fixes #676

Bug Fixes 🐛

• OCR Arabic + Latin — Fixed mixed Arabic and Latin OCR output where English text appeared as empty boxes when run alongside Arabic. Dual font loading now covers any non Latin script combined with Latin. Also fixes the bug in #724

• HEIC in workflow — HEIC images are now correctly accepted in the image to pdf workflow node. Fixes #703

• Email parsing reliability — MsgReader CJS/ESM interop fix for .msg files. Fixes #701

• Sign PDF signature editor width — Editor now fills the full available width like the rest of the tool. Fixes #653

• PDF Compare export issue - Now export correctly filters out instead of showing all the changes in exported PDF. Fixes #655

• RFC 3161 error - Now users can correctly timestamp using RFC 3161. Fixes #649

• .mjs MIME errors on self-hosted nginx — Vite now emits .js instead of .mjs for built assets, so PDFs no longer fail to load on self-hosted setups whose mime.types doesn't include a .mjs → application/javascript mapping. Fixes the failures reported by users on the Proxmox helper script.

A note on canonicals

A lot of BentoPDF users come to and use bentopdf.com directly since the whole thing runs in the browser. Over the past few months I've received complaints from people who searched for BentoPDF and ended up on someone else's self hosted instance instead of the main site. Sometimes that worked out, but more often it confused users and put unwanted traffic on a self hoster who never asked for it.

To address this, canonical URLs, hreflang, and the sitemap now default to bentopdf.com unless explicitly overridden. This only affects deployments that are exposed to the public internet. Internal and private self-hosted instances (anyone running with ROBOTS_NOINDEX=true) are unaffected, since search engines were never indexing those pages to begin with.

The change fixes three things at once:

• Self-hosters keep their bandwidth. Public-facing self-hosted instances no longer absorb search traffic from people who were actually looking for bentopdf.com.
• Users land on the right site. Search results for "BentoPDF" reliably point to bentopdf.com instead of a randomly indexed mirror.
• Self-hosters who want their own canonical can still claim it. Build with --build-arg SITE_URL=https://your-domain.com and canonicals, sitemap, and hreflang all point at your domain. Documented in STATIC-HOSTING.md.

Self-Hosting Docs

The bentopdf-simple was meant to be used for self hosting, while the bentopdf image is used on our live site. But unfortunately many users still run the bentopdf build

• Self-Hosted vs Commercial builds — Docs now clearly distinguish the bentopdf-simple (Self-Hosted) and bentopdf (Commercial) builds across the README, getting-started, docker.md, and self-hosting/index.md. Self Hosted is the recommended default; the existing Commercial path is unchanged.

• New "Common Issues" troubleshooting section — Added .mjs MIME entries and SharedArrayBuffer / COEP-COOP entries to the self-hosting docs, with platform-specific snippets for nginx, Apache, AWS S3, and Kubernetes.

Looking ahead: a bundled self build

Something I'm looking into: bringing back a fully bundled self host image like earlier versions had. The current setup pulls the heavy AGPL libraries (PyMuPDF, Ghostscript, CoherentPDF) from jsDelivr at runtime, which works but is sometimes cumbersome for self hosters to manage. Packaging this cleanly under the dual license takes some thought, so no timeline yet. But for the self hosters who've asked about it, it's on my mind and I am working on it so there's no friction going forward.

A note from the developer

Translations across the 19 locales are still automated through Microsoft Translator for the bulk passes. Native-speaker corrections like the ones @Stephan-P keeps catching are the only thing keeping short-string quality high. A Crowdin or Weblate workflow is on the roadmap so corrections reach a reviewer before they ship. Until then, if you read any of the supported languages and spot something off, a PR or even a quick issue is genuinely appreciated.

By the Community

• build(deps-dev): bump vite from 8.0.5 to 8.0.6 by @dependabot[bot] in #669
• build(deps): bump i18next-http-backend from 3.0.2 to 3.0.5 by @dependabot[bot] in #681
• build(deps): bump postcss from 8.5.8 to 8.5.12 by @dependabot[bot] in #692
• Update tools.json by @Stephan-P in #700 ❤️
• build(deps-dev): bump vite from 8.0.6 to 8.0.7 by @dependabot[bot] in #696
• Update common.json by @Stephan-P in #699
• Refactor modals into partials and add missing i18n keys for settings by @Skillkiller in #658 ❤️
• Localize status messages and UI elements across various tools by @Skillkiller in #664 ❤️
• build(deps-dev): bump vite from 8.0.7 to 8.0.8 by @dependabot[bot] in #705
• build(deps): bump postcss from 8.5.12 to 8.5.13 by @dependabot[bot] in #698
• Feature/improve custom rotate by @quhxl in #631
• build(deps): bump fast-xml-builder from 1.1.5 to 1.2.0 by @dependabot[bot] in #711
• build(deps): bump devalue from 5.6.4 to 5.8.1 by @dependabot[bot] in #720
• build(deps): bump svelte from 5.54.1 to 5.55.7 by @dependabot[bot] in #721
• build(deps): bump mermaid from 11.13.0 to 11.15.0 by @dependabot[bot] in #713
• build(deps-dev): bump vite from 8.0.8 to 8.0.9 by @dependabot[bot] in #712
• Update tools.json by @Stephan-P in #718 ❤️
• build(deps): bump i18next-http-backend from 3.0.5 to 3.0.6 by @dependabot[bot] in #697

New Contributors

• @quhxl made their first contribution in #631 ❤️

Full Changelog: v2.8.4...v2.8.5

That's it for now. Thank you for using BentoPDF. Have a great weekend! ❤️

Warning

This release addresses the security vulnerability GHSA-6vh8-4frx-647f which affects all versions including and prior to v2.8.2.

All users of BentoPDF are recommended to upgrade immediately to the latest version 2.8.3

A note of thanks

A huge thank you to @Astaruf for discovering this vulnerability and reporting it to us through responsible disclosure. Independent security researchers like Lorenzo are what keep open source software trustworthy, and we are genuinely grateful for the care and professionalism shown throughout the process. This is exactly how coordinated vulnerability disclosure should work, and BentoPDF is safer today because of it. Thank you. ❤️

What's Changed

• Update common.json - Dutch language by @Stephan-P in #641
• build(deps-dev): bump vite from 7.3.1 to 7.3.2 by @dependabot[bot] in #642
• static.yml: fix static workflow regression from commit 1fc9620 by @ntfreak in #648
• build(deps): bump dompurify from 3.3.3 to 3.4.0 by @dependabot[bot] in #660
• Added Ukrainian translation by @SerhiiZahuba in #628
• Add Japanese translation by @tkymmm in #650
• Belarusian translation update by @pavel-miniutka in #666
• build(deps-dev): bump vite from 7.3.2 to 8.0.5 by @dependabot[bot] in #643

New Contributors

• @ntfreak made their first contribution in #648
• @SerhiiZahuba made their first contribution in #628
• @tkymmm made their first contribution in #650

A note from the developer

BentoPDF is maintained by a single developer. While every effort is made to ensure the codebase is reviewed, scanned, and hardened before each release, the reality of a solo-maintained project is that comprehensive security coverage is not achievable without external input. The surface area of a modern document-processing tool is substantial, and no individual reviewer can reasonably cover all of it alone.

This disclosure has been a humbling reminder that no codebase is perfect, and that security is a process and not a milestone. Going forward, BentoPDF will be putting more active investment into security hardening: stricter reviews for anything touching untrusted input, expanded automated scanning in CI, and faster turnaround on reports.

If you find something that looks off like a bug, a misconfiguration, an edge case that feels risky then please tell us. Report privately through GitHub Security Advisories or email [email protected]. You do not need a working exploit, proof of impact, or a perfectly written report. A description and a hint is enough, and we will take it from there. Every report genuinely helps, and every reporter gets credited.

Thank you for using BentoPDF, and thank you for helping us make it safer.

Full Changelog: v2.8.2...v2.8.3

This release contains minor bug fixes and quality of life improvements.

New Features

• Configurable Docker port — Set PORT env var to change the container listen port (default remains 8080)

Bug Fixes 🐛

• Preserve original filename on download — All tools now keep the original filename instead of renaming to encrypted-, flattened_, rotated_, etc.
• Fix Page Size auto orientation — Auto orientation now correctly matches the source page layout
• Multi-channel TIFF support — Handle multi-channel TIFF formats and add compression options
• OCR quality improvement — Copy original pages in OCR instead of embedding rasterized PNGs
• Nginx non-root permissions — Resolve permission errors when running as non-root user that was introduced in v2.8
• Reverted nginx base image — Back to unprivileged version for security

Improvements

• Simple mode dist in releases — dist-simple-{version}.zip is now included in GitHub releases

By the Community

• Update tools.json - Corrections to Dutch translation by @Stephan-P in #625 ❤️
• Embed static app version in HTML via Vite at build time by @Skillkiller in #617 ❤️
• build(deps): bump lodash from 4.17.23 to 4.18.1 by @dependabot[bot] in #636

Full Changelog: v2.8.1...v2.8.2

Dad Joke Of the Release

I had a joke about a paper. But I think it's tearable 🤣

What's Changed

• PDF Overlay & Underlay Tool
  New tool to overlay or underlay pages from one PDF onto another.
  Supports mode selection (overlay/underlay), page range targeting, and looping for shorter overlay documents.

• Timestamp PDF tool with RFC 3161 support by @InstaZDLL
  New tool to add RFC 3161 trusted timestamps to PDF documents

• Encrypted PDF Support
  Earlier users had to unlock a PDF before using any tool. Now BentoPDF prompts when uploading encrypted PDFs and also auto repairs PDF on upload

New Quality of Life Improvements

• Disable Specific Tools — Self-hosters can now disable individual tools via the DISABLE_TOOLS environment variable. Includes documentation.
• Disable PDF Editor Features — New option to disable specific features within the PDF Editor for customized deployments.

Bug Fixes 🐛

• Filename Deduplication — Smart filename deduplication utility integrated across multiple file conversion modules to prevent overwrites. Fixes #603

By the Community ❤️

• Update tools.json - Alerts added by @Stephan-P in #606
• build(deps-dev): bump handlebars from 4.7.8 to 4.7.9 by @dependabot[bot] in #610
• Update tools.json - Typos corrected in Dutch language by @Stephan-P in #612
• build(deps): bump picomatch from 2.3.1 to 2.3.2 by @dependabot[bot] in #609
• fix: in bookmarks editor focus cancel- or ok-button for opened confirm and alert modals by @lukasstorck in #604
• build(deps-dev): bump brace-expansion from 2.0.2 to 2.0.3 by @dependabot[bot] in #613
• Update common.json - Dutch language updated by @Stephan-P in #615

New Contributors

• @InstaZDLL made their first contribution in #576 ❤️

Thank you for using BentoPDF. Have a great day ahead! ❤️

Full Changelog: v2.7.0...v2.8.0

Dad Joke Of the Release

What do you call a meditating dog? Aware wolf 🐺🤣

What's Changed

1. New PDF to CBZ (Comic Book Archive) Tool

Convert any PDF into a CBZ file for comic book readers like Komga, Kavita, CDisplayEx, and Calibre

Choose between JPEG, PNG, or WebP image formats with quality and scale controls

Optional grayscale conversion and manga mode (right-to-left reading)

Full metadata support with ComicInfo.xml, metadata.opf, and ComicBookInfo JSON which works with both comic readers AND Calibre

Fill in Title, Series, Volume, Issue Number, Author, Publisher, Tags, Published Year, and Rating

2. PDF to TIFF Revamp

Added compression options: LZW, Deflate, CCITT Group 4, JPEG, PackBits, or None

DPI slider (72–600) for print-quality control

Color mode selector: Color (RGB), Greyscale, or Black & White (1-bit)

Multi-page TIFF support — save all pages as a single TIFF file instead of a ZIP

CCITT Group 4 compression auto-selects B&W mode for optimal document archival

3. PDF Editor Update

Added Free Highlight annotation tool

Added Insert Text annotation

Added Replace Text annotation

Added Comment annotations

Annotations can now be rotated

4. OCR Improvement

Fonts are now subsetted instead of fully embedded by default, significantly reducing output file size

Added option to opt out and embed full fonts if needed

Bug Fixes

Fixed Docker healthcheck using curl (not available in Alpine image) and now uses wget

Fixed custom 404 page not being served by nginx and added error_page 404 directive

By the Community ❤️

Minor Dutch language corrections by @Stephan-P in #594

feat: add page up/down hotkeys for quick bookmark input by @lukasstorck in #601

Fix missing translations in Settings/Shortcuts modal by @hagibr in #521

Implement missing i18n translations for PDF-to-Image modules by @Skillkiller in #565

New Contributors

@lukasstorck made their first contribution in #601 ❤️

Full Changelog: v2.6.0...v2.7.0

Dad Joke of the Release

I was about to tell a joke about carpentry? But I didn't think it woodwork 🤣

• Add Page Labels Feature
  New tool for applying Roman numerals, prefixes, and custom numbering ranges to PDFs.
• Flattening Enhancements
  Flatten annotations directly into PDF page content, making them permanent and non editable.
• PDF Comparison Enhancements
  New overlay options and filtering controls for more precise side-by-side comparisons, with reduced false-positive highlights.
• Transparent Form Field Backgrounds
  Form fields can now be created with transparent backgrounds for cleaner overlays on existing documents.

By The Community ❤️

Update common.json - Dutch translation updated by @Stephan-P in #563
Update tools.json - Dutch translation updated by @Stephan-P in #564
fix(form-creator): checkbox/radio resize constraints + handle cursors by @YuF-9468 in #568
build(deps-dev): bump undici from 7.22.0 to 7.24.1 by @dependabot[bot] in #574
build(deps): bump devalue from 5.6.3 to 5.6.4 by @dependabot[bot] in #570
add Russian translation by @xtotdam in #555
Started translating to German by @luna-cant-code in #575
build(deps): bump jspdf from 4.2.0 to 4.2.1 by @dependabot[bot] in #586

New Contributors

@YuF-9468 made their first contribution in #568 ❤️
@xtotdam made their first contribution in #555 ❤️

Full Changelog: v2.5.0...v2.6.0

Dad Joke of the Release

Why did the laptop get cold? Cause it let its Windows open🤣

What's Changed

PDF Comparison Rewrite

• Semantic Text Diffing
  • Word-level diff engine with exact bounding-box highlighting on both documents
  • Handles additions, deletions, modifications, and full page insertions/removals
  • CJK word segmentation for accurate Chinese, Japanese, and Korean comparisons
• Moved-Text Detection
  • Detects paragraphs that moved position between documents (≥3 words, ≥80% Jaccard similarity)
  • Collapsed into single "Moved" changes with purple highlights instead of noisy add/remove pairs
• Style Change Detection
  • Detects font family and font size changes on otherwise identical text
• Content Category Classification
  • Every detected change is automatically classified into one of six categories: Text, Image, Header/Footer, Annotation, Formatting, Background
  • Header/footer detection based on y-position analysis (top/bottom 12% of page)
  • Image comparison via area-overlap matching (detects added, removed, and resized images)
  • Annotation diffing compares subtype, contents, and position
  • Background change detection triggers when visual mismatch exceeds text change coverage
• Smart Page Pairing
  • Automated page-pairing model using content signatures instead of naive page-number matching
  • Correctly handles inserted/deleted pages between document versions
• OCR Support
  • OCR for scanned documents, toggled from the toolbar
  • OCR results cached in LRU cache to avoid redundant processing
  • Low-quality text detection auto-triggers OCR when extracted text is unreliable
• Filter System
  • Change type filter pills: Modified, Added, Deleted, Moved, Style Changed
  • Content category filter pills: Text, Image, Header/Footer, Annotation, Formatting, Background
• PDF Export
  • Four export modes: Split View, Alternating Pages, Left Document Only, Right Document Only
• Bug Fixes
  • Rotation fix: Corrected PDF page rotation functionality with comprehensive test coverage (380 new tests)

By the Community ❤️

• add Korean (ko) translation by @the0807 in #552
• fix correct locale path in translation guide, add missing link attributes in footer, fix wasm version in readme by @iegl3 in #553
• build(deps): bump dompurify from 3.3.1 to 3.3.2 by @dependabot[bot] in #551
• build(deps-dev): bump minimatch from 5.1.6 to 5.1.9 by @dependabot[bot] in #550
• build(deps): bump rollup from 4.55.1 to 4.59.0 by @dependabot[bot] in #522
• minor correction in documentation by @Olivetti in #531
• Pdf to image direct image by @Skillkiller in #215

New Contributors ❤️

• @the0807 made their first contribution in #552 ❤️
• @iegl3 made their first contribution in #553 ❤️
• @Olivetti made their first contribution in #531 ❤️
• @Skillkiller made their first contribution in #215 ❤️

Full Changelog: v2.4.1...v2.5.0
This was a big rewrite, so please try out the new comparison tool and report any bug fixes. Thank you! 🎉

What's Changed

• 1. Quick Look on all Page Previews
     Now on hovering over a page preview a magnifying button allows a quick preview of that particular page
• Enhanced the scale of all page previews for a sharper render
• Bug Fixes and other changes
  Remove blank pages tool was not working correctly and identified all the pages as blank. This has been fixed.
• build(deps): bump svelte from 5.53.1 to 5.53.6 by @dependabot[bot] in #533
• build(deps): bump the npm-dependencies group across 1 directory with 29 updates by @dependabot[bot] in #534
• Update tools.json - Option Apply watermark to all pages by @Stephan-P in #535

Full Changelog: v2.4.0...v2.4.1

Thank you for the support and please test and report any bugs ❤️

What's Changed

• 1. PDF Form Creator Revamp Now along with creating new form fields you can also edit existing fields!
• Barcode support has been added! Now you can choose from any of the following types:
  QR Code, Code 128, Code 39, EAN-13, UPC-A, DataMatrix and PDF417
• 1. Batch Decryption Now multiple PDFs which share the same password can be decrypted

Bug Fixes

CORS Proxy configuration was not added to Dockerfile which led to failed certificate requests. This has been fixed.

New Contributors

• @maxbengtzen made their first contribution in #529 ❤️

Full Changelog: v2.3.3...v2.4.0

Thank you for the support and please test and report any bugs ❤️

Dad Joke of the Release

What do you call a sad strawberry? A blueberry🤣

What's Changed

• 1. PDF Watermark Tool

The PDF Watermark tool has been revamped. You can now set to apply watermark to all pages or a range of pages. A new scale option, along with position and flatten options have been added. Along with this, the watermark can be now placed via drag and drop.

Bug Fixes

• Fix duplicate pages being shown in PDF Multitool #508
• Compact mode not showing up in Simple Mode has been fixed #505
• Workflow Tool had an error loading saved templates. This has been fixed #517 #507
• Update common.json by @Stephan-P in #503
• Update tools.json by @Stephan-P in #504
• build(deps): bump jspdf from 4.1.0 to 4.2.0 by @dependabot[bot] in #498
• build(deps): bump svelte from 5.48.2 to 5.53.1 by @dependabot[bot] in #502
• Updating the portuguese translations for the new tools by @hagibr in #516
• Correction on pdfToExcel.name (Portuguese) by @hagibr in #518
• Adding 'PDF Workflow Builder' and 'Bates Numbering' to toolTranslationKeys by @hagibr in #519
• build(deps-dev): bump qs from 6.14.1 to 6.15.0 by @dependabot[bot] in #496
• build(deps): bump markdown-it from 14.1.0 to 14.1.1 by @dependabot[bot] in #480

New Contributors

@hagibr made their first contribution in #516 ❤️

Full Changelog: v2.3.1...v2.3.3

Thank you everyone for your support. Please test it out and report any bugs and have a great weekend! ❤️

Dad Joke of the Release

What do math teachers wear glasses? It helps with diVision🤣

What's Changed

• Bates Stamping
  You can now use bates stamping on multiple PDFs!
  Choose from pre existing options or customize it

• Collapsible Sections and Compact Mode
  BentoPDF sections can now be collapsed as a dropdown! Since we have now over 100+ tools we now have added a compact mode for BentoPDF. To enable it go to Settings > Preference > Enable Compact Mode

• Fixes & Improvements
  Belarusian translation update by @pavel-miniutka in #486
  fix: httproute invalid syntax and tweak chart by @tzabbi in #493
  chore: update bentopdf version in helm chart by @tzabbi in #494
  chore: pin xlsx version by @diogotcorreia in #501

New Contributors

• @tzabbi made their first contribution in #493
• @diogotcorreia made their first contribution in #501

Full Changelog: v2.2.1...v2.3.0

Full Changelog: v2.3.0...v2.3.1