Unfortunately not open source, but I have good experience with Master pdf Editor. It "is a proprietary application to edit PDF documents on Linux, Windows and macOS. It can create, edit (insert text or images), annotate, view, encrypt, and sign PDF documents.": https://www.linuxuprising.com/2019/04/download-master-pdf-editor-4-for-linux.html
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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+1 for master PDF editor. It's the only one that I found working. There are 2 version: one completely free (V4) and one with subscription (V5)
Unfortunately I didn't find any single PDF editing app that stands out, so far. Although it's important to note that Firefox as made some progress recently on this topic. The embedded PDF viewer now allows to write, sketch and draw on documents (e.g a signature) and save the changes, i think you can also highlight. When it comes to digital signatures and adding/removing/sorting pages, you will need another app.
Xournalpp is what you are looking for.
It has a horrible outdated interface, but it makes layerwise edits and preserves the original data of the doc.
I'm using pdftk to add/remove pages, which works perfectly. Also does stuff like rotate some pages, ect. Easily scriptable, so stapling together all the PDFs in a dictionary is super easy.
For actual editing (removing text, adding complex things), I just use Inkscape. How well that works depends on the PDF itself.
And just highlighting text is something every single PDF viewer can do nowadays.
Oh, interesting. I could see how the pdftk CLI could be powerful. Do you know if the source code repository is actually public? I couldn’t find it.
I don't think the repository itself is public. But pdftk is licenced under GPL2, and so PTFLabs has published the source code here.
I imagine you could contact PDFLabs directly if you wanted to contribute.
I frequently see Okular as a suggested app when someone is asking about a pdf editor.
Myself I am using pdfarranger but it only allows to reorder / remove / combine / split pdf. You can't highlight or redact text with it.
Thanks. Yeah, I’ve started to check out Okular, but I think it doesn’t allow you to change the pages. So maybe a combination of the two would fulfill my requirements.
What are you doing with it? Okular is a nice FOSS solution for viewing, annotating, signing, etc. which covers many people's usage. If you really need a full editor, I would generally stick with Adobe's stuff. Don't know any free or FOSS solution that works better.
Inkscape is the only strong tool for editing PDF that I can recommend today. Even though I'm unsure about semantics, it helped me a lot recently.
You and me both, chief.
To the best of my knowledge, there isn't a good FOSS PDF editor.
There's LibreOffice Draw, but as you said, it messes up the formatting. There's also Inkscape, but good luck if you have pages of text. You can also try Scribus, but I wouldn't say it's good (or intuitive).
If all you want to do is write over a PDF, put (not edit, nor remove) text, formulae, or images, then Xournal++ is very decent.
If I need to edit a PDF, I use (*gags*) Adobe Acrobat running in Wine (with Lutris is very easy). It's as proprietary and evil as it can be, but it's good at editing PDFs.
Depends what you wanna do, xournal for free edits is good. If it's a simple document OnlyOffice imports pdfs also.