Enchanced PDF viewer website with bookmarking capabilites
Why am I working on this project? Well, over the summer of 2026, I began reading a book on Extended Kalman Filters (EKFs) with the hope to write my own EKF filter for a UAV. A technical guide was available for free by a university professor but I was only able to download it as a PDF. This meant that everytime I wanted to restart my laptop or accidently closed the PDF, I would lose the page number I was currently on, and have to search for it with nothing but hopes and prayers. That is the problem that I was set out to solve with this PDF reader. It would act like a 'Kindle' or 'Apple Books' app and store the page that a user is currently on. The user would be able to upload their PDFs, which would be stored in a database along with the current page number, and after logging into their account, they could retrieve their PDF with up-to-date progress information.
Beginning this project, I first had to search for the tools that would be required to make my vision a reality. I decided to stick with what I know, that is Astro.js for the frontend, but combine it with React so I could use its robust state system. To navigate PDF's, I decided to use PDF.js, which is a general-purpose platform for parsing and rendering PDFs created by Mozilla, and Supabase, a Postgres database, since I've had considerable knowledge using PostgreSQL.