UX Feedback & Potential Contributions: Form Filling and Annotation Tools

[cheema-corellian]

Hi everyone,

I’ve recently started using the Docker version of Stirling-PDF and am really impressed with how easy it was to get up and running.

As I used the tool to fill out a complex PDF, I noted a few UX hurdles. I’m sharing these here to see if they are known issues or if I’m missing a preferred workflow. I am also open to submitting a PR for some of these if someone can point me toward the right area of the repository!

1. Tooling & Guidance

• Form Filler vs. Scanned PDFs: The "Fill Form" tool doesn't support non-fillable/scanned documents. It would be helpful if the error message suggested using the "Annotate" or "Add Text" tools as a fallback.
• Text Box Interaction: I noticed the Text Box tool requires a "click-and-drag" to create a field, whereas other annotation tools respond to a single click. Standardizing this could improve discoverability.

2. Text Editor Behavior

• Navigation Keys: Standard shortcuts like Home and End don't currently work within the text boxes.
• Whitespace Handling: The editor appears to strip multiple spaces. For scanned forms where users might use spaces for alignment across multiple fields in one box, this creates a challenge.

3. Data Persistence

• Auto-save: I unfortunately lost about 20 minutes of work due to a session/browser refresh issue. Is an auto-save or "draft recovery" feature currently on the roadmap or technically feasible within the current architecture?

My Question:
Are there active PRs or planned refactors for the annotation engine that I should be aware of? If not, I’d love to take a crack at the Home/End key support or the error message improvements as a starting point.

Thanks for the great tool!