good pdf editor?

kelvinjps@beehaw.org to Free and Open Source Software@beehaw.org – 62 points –
24

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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