# BentoPDF — Privacy-First Self-Hosted PDF Toolkit

> BentoPDF is a self-hosted web application that provides a comprehensive set of PDF tools including merging, splitting, converting, and OCR without sending files to external services.

## Install

Save in your project root:

# BentoPDF — Privacy-First Self-Hosted PDF Toolkit

## Quick Use
```bash
docker run -d -p 3000:3000 --name bentopdf ghcr.io/alam00000/bentopdf
```

## Introduction
BentoPDF bundles the most common PDF operations into a single self-hosted web app. Because everything runs on your own server, sensitive documents never leave your network.

## What BentoPDF Does
- Merges multiple PDF files into a single document
- Splits PDFs by page ranges or extracts individual pages
- Converts images (JPG, PNG) to PDF and PDF pages to images
- Performs OCR on scanned documents to make text searchable
- Compresses PDF file sizes while preserving readability

## Architecture Overview
BentoPDF is a JavaScript and TypeScript application using pdf-lib, Tesseract.js, and other libraries for PDF manipulation. The web frontend provides a drag-and-drop interface that communicates with a backend API. All processing happens server-side in the container.

## Self-Hosting & Configuration
- Deploy with a single Docker command, no external database needed
- Configure upload size limits via environment variables
- Mount a volume if you want to persist processed files
- Place behind a reverse proxy for TLS and access control
- Customize the UI theme through configuration options

## Key Features
- All-in-one PDF operations in a single web interface
- Privacy-first: files are processed locally and never leave your server
- OCR support for extracting text from scanned PDFs
- Batch processing for handling multiple files at once
- Lightweight container with minimal system requirements

## Comparison with Similar Tools
- **Stirling PDF** — similar self-hosted PDF toolkit with a broader feature set
- **ILovePDF** — cloud-hosted service that processes files on external servers; BentoPDF keeps files local
- **Smallpdf** — freemium cloud service with usage limits; BentoPDF is free and unlimited
- **pdftk** — CLI-only tool; BentoPDF provides a graphical web interface
- **ConvertX** — general file converter; BentoPDF specializes in PDF-specific operations

## FAQ
**Q: Does BentoPDF require a database?**
A: No, it runs without an external database. File processing is stateless.

**Q: What OCR languages are supported?**
A: BentoPDF uses Tesseract for OCR and supports multiple languages. Additional language packs can be added to the container.

**Q: Is there a file size limit?**
A: The default limit is configurable. Since you host it yourself, you can set it as high as your server resources allow.

**Q: Can I use BentoPDF for batch operations?**
A: Yes, you can upload and process multiple files in a single operation through the web interface.

## Sources
- https://github.com/alam00000/bentopdf

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Source: https://tokrepo.com/en/workflows/03c80967-3c2e-11f1-9bc6-00163e2b0d79
Author: AI Open Source