What do you use to edit PDF on your phone?

nameisnotimportant@lemmy.ml to Android@lemmy.world – 23 points –

Dear Lemmings,

I deal with several PDF files on a daily basis. I'm still struggling to find a nice FOSS app to edit PDFs on my phone.

My common needs are :

  • OCR the content
  • merge pages
  • delete pages
  • reorder pages

A bonus would be:

  • edit content
  • fill form, print / send to email

Do you know one which is able to do this?

Many thanks

22

Speaking from experience, when it comes to file formats, PDFs are like an ancient eldritch horror monster. I'm not surprised this doesn't exist, PDF are awful to work with.

Thanks for your feedback, I do agree with you and I don't do it for fun either. That said, I often get the need to do different tasks and I wanted to know if I could skip the need to use a computer for this.

Fire this up in Docker somewhere and use your phone browser. Could probably even use Termux on your Android, have never tested that.

https://stirlingtools.com/

Thanks that's a super great idea!

EDIT: Fired it up and it works brilliantly on a mobile, I'm impressed! I wish I had that idea before, thanks mate!

What do you mean that docker can run in Termux. I had no idea...

Second this, brilliant suite. The solution was so obvious.

Tbh you could strip out all the used tools and add a mobile/desktop interface too. Kotlin for example.

Just someone has to do it.

Thank you for this. I do have a homelab with various tools, and I sometimes need to convert and adjust PDF files, and I was using all kinds of shady websites. Not anymore :)

Now, if it only had a translate option too...

I wouldn't bother trying to edit PDF anything on a handheld. That's a computer task.

Thanks for your feedback, I do agree with you and I don't do it for fun either. That said, I often get the need to do different tasks and I wanted to know if I could skip the need to use a computer for this.

What I'm saying is -- the time spent editing on a phone will be far more than just sitting down and doing it with a nice app on a proper laptop. It's not about the ease, it's about the speed.

I'm not a lemming and this isn't FOSS, but FoxIt will do at least some of what you want.

PDF is a presentation format. Edit the original.

Sorry if my post wasn't clear, I meant my PDFs like my files which are stored on my computer, but that doesn't mean I have all the source files (far from that), I'm talking about all the PDFs that you get from others, like from work, suppliers, etc

Yeah, the point is that all those people sending you PDFs suck. Or your workflow sucks.

Example, presentation slides. There are people drawing on them, adding additional infos instead of condensing informations.

PDFs are for presenting, people use them for editing which makes no sense. Example: linebreaks are placed where it makes sense for the printed text, with font size etc. If you copy text and change font size, they will be everywhere and the info is literally missing to fix that.

So instead, you use a simplified format that doesnt have the needed info and add AI, OCR etc to add that info.

Its horrible.

TLDR: ask those people to send you the original files

I don't usually edit PDFs on my phone. On the PC, I use pdftk+qpdf+img2pdf+ocrmypdf (all command-line apps). Some of those can be found in the default Termux repos once you install the terminal emulator; some, perhaps, could be compiled and used as well.