Hello everyone, I was wondering if anyone knew of a FOSS editing app to use on PDFs, just to add text and and mark things out, I tried GNU image editor but it just works on images exclusively. Any ideas are appreciated, thanks.
Overkill for this but just wanted to mention
stirlingtools.com/ (self-hosted PDF magic)
I end up using gimp because I always have it installed and raster is easier than relying on the PDF forms to be set up properly.
Libre office Draw also works for basic editing
But from experience, it won’t properly load existing PDFs. At least not the ones it didn’t make. At the very least, it tends to strip the font.
Depends what you’re trying to do and what created the pdf. pdftools are good, but they’re command line tools which might not be your scene (
dnf/apt/zypper search pdf). Inkscape, Libreoffice are usually a good gui compromise.Scribus works, but it’s not terribly user friendly. I’ve looked around for a while for something that is easy to work with, but haven’t found anything better. For some forms, I end up needing to fire up my Windows VM and run Adobe.
PDF Studio by Qoppa, paid (lifetime subscription) but fantastic, native Linux: https://www.qoppa.com/pdfstudio/
Firefox. Firefox can draw, sign, highlight, add text in boxes, add pictures. This should be recommended more.
Several options:
- Master PDF Editor, version 4 is free (and in AUR);
- PDF Arranger, good for bulk edits;
- jPdfTweak, a veritable swiss knife of PDF editing;
- jPDFBookmarks, the best for editing bookmarks;
- Briss, for bulk cutting PDFs;
- Krop, also for cutting, but less flexible.
Briss is funny cuz its name and what it does
Okular and Xournal++ both do well for annotating an existing PDF, but you can only add not remove or modify.
For modifying, LibreOffice will do it at the expense of the layout getting seriously mangled even on the simplest of PDFs.
If you have libreOffice installed I believe you can edit pdfs in Draw.
You can also try Inkscape.
I have used Krita to edit 1-2 page PDFs, but it’s clunky as each page is its own layer. If you’re looking for something that lets you add notes to an entire book or something… probably not useful.
I’ve used Xournal++ before for adding things like signatures to pdfs
I did not know this, thanks.
Another vouch for Xournal++ here. Never in my life have I been so frustrated with software until I was asked to sign a pdf. I also learned this is the entire reason Docusign was created.
Forget editing any wording yourself either unless you want to spend forever fixing the formatting. The ultimate software as a service is paying to edit a fucking document. When I found Xournal it was like finding gold in the ocean as it was seriously the only decent option on Linux.
