Show HN: PDFx – a 2D canvas for multiple PDFs, stored inside a single PDF
https://github.com/alexandrosgounis/pdfx/
I was asked to provide 17 PDF files for my mortgage application. I got tired of opening and closing files, and started looking for ways to process multiple PDFs at once.I came across Adobe's portfolio spec, but that only renders correctly in Acrobat, every other PDF viewer only displays the cover page of each document. So I asked something simpler: what if I could scroll horizontally to see the pages of one document and then vertically to see more documents? I achieved that via an embedded JSON manifest as a standard PDF file attachment.
This enabled bundling multiple PDFs into a single, backwards-compatible PDF. When opened with a regular viewer (Chrome, Acrobat, Preview), it reads as a long, continuous document. When imported into the react-based app I built (PDFx), it's rendered in a 2D canvas, where each document is displayed as a separate entity.
I would highly appreciate your feedback, please let me know if any other open spec exists that I might have missed.