this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Free and Open Source Software

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago

And a very good pdf editor to you sir! tips hat

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Why is that? It’s not like PDF’s are new. If it’s licensing are there non-legal PDF editors that work well?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Wasn't PDF supposed to be a read-only, print-only medium? You're supposed to edit the source material (like a doc) and export that to PDF, not edit PDF directly.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, there's Acrobat. I think that the issue is that PDF is a deceptively complicated format. It's basically a programming language for describing pages to print. So it's not like parsing a JPG or something, you need a PDF interpreter. And I imagine the Adobe one is encumbered.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Probably the same reason it takes so long to come up with third party flash interpreters.

I mean flash isn't exactly new, but for the longest time there was only Adobe flash.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I wonder the same, something od adobe? it's the only one that works.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

yeah I know I tried some of them.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I don't know what type of editing you need to do, and I haven't used it myself, but if I'm not wrong, LibreOffice Draw can edit PDFs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

wowah! First time I heard about this! Thank you!! LibreOffice for the win!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I use LibreOffice Draw to change out text on PDFs a couple times a month at work. I’ll occasionally get some weird formatting issues or random black lines across the PDF, but usually works well enough, especially if I’m going to be printing the document out.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

So far Draw has been the best I've used for this purpose

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For something like signing a pdf it was extremely painful to do natively in Linux or with any Foss tools. As of recently Firefox let's you edit, annotate, and sign PDFs. It's honestly one of the biggest steps towards year of the Linux desktop that I've seen in the last 5 years. Linux still has a ways to go but it's getting there slowly.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Didn't know this was even possible.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Scribus ftw!!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

If it isn't an entire book.l, Inkscape does do PDF editing. LibreOffice Draw does as well.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Okular. Okular all the way.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I don't think I saw Xournal++ (AKA Xournalpp) mentioned yet, which has helped me once or twice.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use master pdf editor 4. O know it is not foss, but it was the best option for linux IMO.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Wow, that is pretty nice. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

That sounds like an excellent idea. I look forward to it very much.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

For quick and dirty edits leading to rasterization of the PDF (i.e no more text fields), use can use GIMP.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

How much do you need to do? PDFSAM has been very good to me if you just need basic operations.