Yes, you could see it like that. I actually started developing PdfDing after I did not find any ebook reader that fulfilled all of my requirements.

What’s up with changing to github?

I answered this in another thread, so I just copy it here. I hope that’s okay.

I tried to make codeberg work, but it is really hard to gain traction and interaction with the community over there. For example, while I got 3 issues from the community on codeberg in over 5 months, on github I already got two in just two days. Of course it could be a coincidence or the same users as on codeberg.

I am developing PdfDing not only for myself but also as way to give back to the community for all the great projects I am using. So I want it to be used by many people. I want and need the interaction with the community. The issues I got until now were great feature requests that I would have not thought of on my own. Maybe I will also get contributors, would be great for sure.

but the biggest thing I see missing is support for indexing / searching documents.

I think it would be quite cool to have support for indexing / searching documents. I am not exactly sure how to do or to incorporate it but there should be a way :). For now it’s not on top of my to-do list as there are some core features I am still missing and want to finish first. Feel free to create an issue on GitHub.

PdfDing has a totally different use case than stirling-pdf. stirling-pdf is for manupilating PDF files, in contrast the PdfDing is for viewing and managing PdfFiles.

There are also self-hostable ebook readers, but they (at least the ones I have tried) don’t allow individual users to upload their own files. Usually there is an admin curating the content. Also sharing content with an external audience is difficult.

You are right, there are solutions to for this, that are using the inbuilt PDF viewer of the browser. This works fine on desktops and laptops but on smartphones it will simply download the PDF file and not display it in the browser (at least it is like this on my mobile devices). This solution also does not allow you to continue reading where you stopped on another device.

I needed wanted other features on top:

• every user can upload files
• can be self-hosted via Docker
• minimal and resource-friendly
• SSO support
• Share PDFs with an external audience via a link or a QR Code. There should also be some kind of access control mechanism for the shared PDFs

Hi, developer of PdfDing here. I understand what you are saying, but allow me to explain. I tried to make codeberg work, but it is really hard to gain traction and interaction with the community over there. For example, while I got 3 issues from the community on codeberg in over 5 months, on github I already got two in just two days. Of course it could be a coincidence or the same users as on codeberg.

I am developing PdfDing not only for myself but also as way to give back to the community for all the great projects I am using. So I want it to be used by many people. I want and need the interaction with the community. The issues I got until now were great feature requests that I would have not thought of on my own. Maybe I will also get contributors, would be great for sure.