We spent years on the other side of this: building products that needed a PDF viewer, and finding that every serious option came with the same two problems.
The first was the license. A capable PDF component was sold like enterprise software, through a sales cycle that ended in a multi-year agreement priced in the tens of thousands. That suits a bank. It does not suit a three-person team with a good idea and a deadline.
The second was what "editing" meant. Most components let you draw a box over the old words. Very few let you change the words themselves, in the document's own font, with the paragraph reflowing around the edit. The gap between those two things is the gap between a viewer and a tool people actually finish their work in.
So we built the component we had wanted to buy. It edits the text itself. It opens a hundred-megabyte scan before the person has finished sitting down. It lays itself out for a phone from the same configuration as a workstation. It never sends a document anywhere. And it starts at a price a startup can put on a company card without a call.
Kernstra is the name we gave to that work. This page is who is behind it.
"Build on documents, not around them."The line we kept coming back to. Everything else on the site is an argument for it.
Done properly, before done widely.Every tool is finished before the next one starts. We would rather be excellent at what we offer than adequate at more.