Scribus has really good PDF support. It's a full desktop publishing program (like InDesign), so it might not be the best for quick conversions. It does a really good job of PDF forms though.
this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
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I put one in at work. It sat idle for a while until a member of my admin staff asked me how to do a job involving pay slips. We discovered the pipeline tool in Stirling. It is now a permanent system with an SLA!
Each tool has a nice big icon or you can create desktop or browser shortcuts to the ones of interest - ideal for keeping it simple.
Okular for forms. qpdf just for quick viewing and reading. PDF arranger for rearranging pages. pdftk (CLI) for some serious work on PDFs. Exiftool and qpdf (both CLIs) for metadata and linearizing.
I use PDF Arranger a lot for that
For working with PDFs on a page level (moving pages around, deleting, copying pages between PDFs etc) pdfarranger is the best and easiest of anything I could find, can vouch for it.
For edits whithin a page, I use inkscape. Both program combined have covered all my needs until now.
Or libreoffice draw sometimes, it depends, but yes, pdfarranger + one of the two is enough for most of the tasks.
As other have said, a combination of Firefox PDF tool, PDF Arranger and Xournal++ is all I've ever needed. And Okular is nowadays my viewer of choice, which does a lot on its own, too.
Xournal++ works pretty good in my experience
can't say about forms, but I use xournal all the time for signing pdfs.
I'd suggest Stirling PDF, just get the Stirling-PDF.jar file from the releases. It does really lots of stuff (though I had some issues with creating pdfs with multiple pages per page). It open a port for the service to run locally and once you close it, it also closes the port.
I also use libre office draw (or firefox printing menu) to create pdfs with multiple pages per page.
There's also xournal as some other people have mention that has some editing capabilities.
Was gonna suggest a look at sterling PDF as well, great toolkit.
I use a combination of Okular for signing PDFs and PDF Arranger for rearranging pages, etc
https://invent.kde.org/graphics/okular
I like Okular's ability to scan and convert tabled data in PDFs too. There is an option to turn off DRM nonsense. That can do page edits and stuff. If you want to create pages with images you need an office suite.
It also has support for digital signatures that work with saved inserted signatures
Don't browsers allow you to do form fillable these days? I swear i just filled one with firefox the other day. Maybe that's too limited?
For combining pdfs, pdftk from the command line is my goto. The command line interface for it isn't too complicated.
It does, as well as adding pictures into it and drawing by hand, so handwritten signing shouldn't be an issue, either.
It doesn't allow you to merge several PDFs, that's still something they need other software for.
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I've been through a lot of options trying to get the same functionality you mentioned. I've never found a single app that works particularly well. I'm surprised the state of PDF apps is so poor in Linux. Others have mentioned a bunch of apps and each fails in some major way. I'll come back and check this comment section later for new suggestions for my own sake too.
There is a reason for that. PDFs de facto "standard" is complex and documentation is sparse. PDFs were also designed to be static and uneditable which makes a lot of simple edits more complex to implement than people think.
Understandable, but it's a significant diifculty in migrating fully to Linux when PDFs are used everywhere and there are solutions that work well on Windows. This is one of the few things I will get my wife's Windows laptop for.
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For "basic edition (rotating pages, etc)", I myself always use pdftk.
"If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses."
Did too until recently, started to switch to qpdf aqs it seems more openly maintained while doing about the same job with, arguably, clearer documentation than pdftk.
I like to add xournal++ for editing PDF without a functional form field. And as other said already: PDF Ranger and Firefox itself
PDF Ranger or PDF Arranger?
Sorry, I meant PDF arranger https://github.com/pdfarranger/pdfarranger
Ahhh OK, I was thinking about the CLI file manager ranger and got excited for a CLI PDF editor.
Yeah, that would be something great for sure!
This one has a perpetual license option, which could be steep for personal use but could be fine for a business. PDFsam Visual is great for what it does. You can also try it for 14 days too and then decide if it's useful for you or not.
Thanks! I'm going to check this out!
No problem!
Thanks for sharing this, it actually looks like a fantastic alternative to Adobe Acrobat DC.
No problem! There are actually a lot of good paid software for Linux too but most people don't know about them. Mostly targeted businesses but that's fine I think.
The options are surprisingly poor.
Personally, I rolled my own TUI script. It uses pdftk to explode and merge, and gs (Ghostscript) to optimize. To paste PNGs of my signature (absurd, but here we are) I use xournal, which looks a bit rough but gets the job done.
For Editing you can use libre office draw or stirling pdf in a docker container. For Formulars and other stuff sounds can use okular.
pdfjam is the only tool i found that resizes images of different sizes to letter size while combining. Though it's cli only. If your file manager has something similiar to Thunars custom actions, you could create little scripts to split, merge, image-to-pdf and put them in the context menu this way.
For filling forms mupdf-gl, for combining and rearranging pages pdf arranger, imagemagick to convert images to files (commandline with easy format 'convert file.png file.pdf'), mupdf and zathura to view them.
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Master pdf editor works great for me. License costs $80, but compared to Adobe prices it is basically free.
I've never had issues with it either, but it's probably overkill for OP's requirements.
I'm guessing Firefox's pdf editor is not sophisticated enough
Yeah as @Nick mentioned, if it was just filling forms that would be fine, but its arranging documents and adding files together that he does most
For basic form filling, the Firefox PDF editor is fine. But sounds like OPβs use case is more advanced than that.
When Python coders create documentation popular options: Sphinx and mkdocs. pandocs for converting a lone vanilla ReStructuredText file.
With Sphinx can create user manual and PDF!
Let me politely add a big warning, there is a learning curve
Any user level questions regarding Sphinx can send my way
This would totally work if it was for me, but the constant complaint from my dad is, "This was easier on Windows, why did you switch me to Linux?" So it has to be 70 year old man easy. Thank you, though!
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