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)
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.
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.
Inkscape.
Some people mentioned Inkscape and I can’t recommend it enough because it’s my goto FOSS PDF editor.
It’s not made for PDFs and it shows, bit regardless it’s absolutely incredible how versatile it is.
You can keep the formatting, it’s vector so no loss of percieved quality, and its Text tool is easy (and fast) to use.
The only problem is each page has to be imported and exported seperstely - you’ll have to use something else to combine them
As far as signing goes, if it can be a classic squiggle it’s perfect - there’s a few pen tools and one has smoothing so you can play with it a bit until the signature looks good.
On mobile, so excuse any typos.
Absolutely. And I think a proper “Export to PDF” in Inkscape is something that should be high on the list of “future features” in Inkscape. Editing the PDF in Inkscape is heaven, having to re-join the pages to one big PDF afterwards is (unnecessary) hell.
I can import and export multi-page PDFs into inkskape just fine. No need to do each page individually.
I can only import multipage PDFs in 1.3.2. Export produces a bunch of single-page PDF files. What version do you use?
I was under the impression that the ability to export a project as a multi-page pdf has been added not long ago, but I might have to check
Yeah, you can export multiple-page PDFs and https://floss.social/@doctormo is working on revamping how it’s handling colour so we will eventually get propper CMYK support and other cool stuff
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.
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
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.
I did not know this, thanks.
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.In addition to what’s already mentioned in the comments, shout out to Inkscape. I guess it’s similar to LibreOffice Draw, but I prefer the user experience of Inkscape. Probably more for single-page PDFs.
If you are into selfhosting then there is a great tool for this called StirlingPDF.
Just set this up last night, it’s very handy for working with pdf’s.
I like Okular, but I also use Xournal++.
