this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
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Hey all,

My father's business requires him to work a lot with PDF forms, combine PDF files, convert scanned pictures to files, etc.

I've found Master PDF editor, but I've found it to be buggy -- specifically when trying to create a new PDF from multiple files the program errors out saying it can't create the file.

I've also tried running Foxxit PDF editor through WINE but that's abysmal.

Any recommendations on Linux native software paid or FOSS, that can fill forms, create/combine PDFs, and do basic edition (rotating pages, etc) that my 70 year old dad can learn to use?

I moved him away from Windows with the Windows 11 debacle, and he's liked Linux so far except for this one issue

Thanks all for your help?

***** EDIT *****

Thanks all for your responses, I'll be trying out StirlingpPDF, PDFSam, OnlyOffice, and re-trying MasterPDF editor over the holidays while I have some 1:1 time with my dad. Tl;Dr: playing family IT and switching your parents to Linux is rough πŸ˜‚

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

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

For edits whithin a page, I use inkscape. Both program combined have covered all my needs until now.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago

I use a combination of Okular for signing PDFs and PDF Arranger for rearranging pages, etc

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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.

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

Was gonna suggest a look at sterling PDF as well, great toolkit.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago

https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago (2 children)

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.

[–] JubilantJaguar 1 points 1 month ago

Exactly. OP should start by seeing what's possible in Firefox.

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[–] j4k3 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] olafurp 3 points 1 month ago

It also has support for digital signatures that work with saved inserted signatures

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

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."

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] thedeadwalking4242 12 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Xournal++ works pretty good in my experience

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

can't say about forms, but I use xournal all the time for signing pdfs.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

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.

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

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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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I like to add xournal++ for editing PDF without a functional form field. And as other said already: PDF Ranger and Firefox itself

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

PDF Ranger or PDF Arranger?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Ahhh OK, I was thinking about the CLI file manager ranger and got excited for a CLI PDF editor.

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

Yeah, that would be something great for sure!

[–] urb5tar 6 points 1 month ago

For Editing you can use libre office draw or stirling pdf in a docker container. For Formulars and other stuff sounds can use okular.

[–] JubilantJaguar 5 points 1 month ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] thekerker 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thanks for sharing this, it actually looks like a fantastic alternative to Adobe Acrobat DC.

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

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.

[–] tapdattl 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thanks! I'm going to check this out!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

No problem!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

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.

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

Yea I use IM for flattening PDFs before I send them.

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

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I've used PDF4QT before.
Didn't get very in depth, but Rotating and Organizing pages worked.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

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.

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

Master pdf editor works great for me. License costs $80, but compared to Adobe prices it is basically free.

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

I'm guessing Firefox's pdf editor is not sophisticated enough

[–] thekerker 2 points 1 month ago

For basic form filling, the Firefox PDF editor is fine. But sounds like OP’s use case is more advanced than that.

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

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

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

LibreOffice has a PDF editor that I use regularly, but its got one big flaw: interpreting word wrap.

Seeing this thread, I'm going to try some of these out.

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

OnlyOffice is the best I think...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Does OO do PDF now? Perhaps it's time to upgrade my Nextcloud server again.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Add the Collabra online built in CODE server and Nextcloud Office apps. Link them up and you have Libre Office in your browser on your Nextcloud. You can get more complicated: https://collabora-online-for-nextcloud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No thanks. OnlyOffice is way better. Better interface and better MS compatibility. Plus it's built for web, while Collabra is a glorified VNC session.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's always good to have choice.

I'm not sure what better MS compatibility really means. I've been using MS software since before Excel, Word etc even existed and taught a lot of people how spreadsheets, word processors, databases, DTP and the rest work in a former life (do you know what a decimal tab stop is, or how to control leading and kerning?)

I generate, by far, the most complicated documents within my company and I have been using LO since way before before it forked from OO. All software has bugs and peccadilloes.

As I said: it's good to have choice.

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

The biggest differences between compatibility are with Word and PowerPoint. Cross-slide animations fail miserably in LO, and line placement and width consistency is always problematic, to name a few. For Word, paragraph formatting and color pallet gets mixed up, too.

Don't get me wrong, LO is great, and it handles large data sets in Excel way better, but if you work in an industry where the document formatting is part of the industry (take marketing, for instance), it doesn't cut it.

[–] tapdattl 1 points 1 month ago

Whoa I had no idea OnlyOffice had a PDF editor, I'll be checking that out this week, thanks!

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