Hi guys! I’m considering some tool to edit the texts and images within a PDF. What would be some decent recommendations? So far I think the only with a semblance of working has been Libreoffice Draw, but it messed the formatting quite a lot (the arrangement is very much off in many pages, the text splits incorrectly, some images pop up duplicated and so on). But so far it’s the only one I’ve seen actually allowing me to play with the PDF contents. Are there any other/better options?
Thanks!
I’ve been using bento pdf (self-hosted)
I’ve found the best tool for carving up PDFs is xournal++. It does a better job at maintaining formatting than Draw as well.
That’s a pretty good one, hadn’t heard about it until you mentioned it. xournal++ is great at marking up PDF files and was able to keep the layout formatting intact with my janky test PDF (a sad document that must have been print-to-pdf’d multiple times under Windows).
I also like that it’s easy to use and has just about every markup tool you’d want, all the stuff that Firefox is missing.
Only thing missing is that it doesn’t have the advanced .pdf export options that the other tools have, but that’s kind of minor… figure I could open/re-export the marked up .pdf in another application if I really want to configure any advanced .pdf options for the final document.
Libreoffice Draw is the best option. You need to make sure all of the fonts used in the PDF are installed on your computer before editing it. The embedded fonts can’t be used for editing. If you are missing a font, Draw will try to find a substitute, which will most likely mess up the spacing. You can go to File->Properties in a PDF viewer like Okular or Xreader to get a list of the fonts that the PDF uses.
Most PDFs aren’t intended to be edited. The incorrect text splits are an issue caused by the program that created the PDF.
Others have already explained about PDF not being easy to edit and lack of FOSS tools.
The only advice I can give is that PDF XChange editor works well under Wine if you have it.
PDF was never designed to be editable. It’s an output/display format.
Inkscape!
2nd this. It is by no means a “PDF Editor”, but it works surprisingly better than most.
Inkscape also could be a good option in OP’s case because it gives options about janking up text. It can either try to find the fonts from those on your system, or it can change every glyph into a path.
That being said, I’ve treid both Inkscape and LO Draw, and I’ve had more luck with Inkscape in regards to keeping fonts similar. In 90% of cases (and I do have to fix up PDFs every now and then) the “Keep text” option doesn’t jank up text.
if you want feature completeness and linux the only option is foxit pdf editor. FOSS there is nothing, and inertia bogs us down, but it’s high time that eveyone ditches pdfs for good and transitions to markup or other free formats
The thing about PDF is that the whole point of PDF is that it shouldn’t be easy to edit. So you’re asking for hacks around something that isn’t supposed to be easily possible.
It’s possible to import PDFs into Inkscape. But my experience is that the result is usually not very easily editable (probably depends on the PDF) because it puts everything into very complex groups and other structures.
On a slightly different tangent does anyone have any recommendations for good applications that can generate markups on pdfs rather than editting the contents? Like adding redline markups to a pdf of a cad drawing?
My recommendations are Firefox, Okular, Inkscape and Draw, depending on usecase.
Firefox is perfect for text-based markup (so higlighting, defacing with text, etc.)
Okular is a bit worse on the text front (doesn’t support editing the markup - for most stuff your only option is to undo so you have to be strategic abput catching mistakes early), but it does more stuff (boxes, arrows, lines, transparency, custom colors).
Draw is better if you actually want to make changes to many pages at once and don’t care if it messes up formatting a bit.
Inkscape is ideal if you want to rearrange stuff on a few pages and change things like colors or stamp on some text. It doesn’t have a nice way for highlighting text, but highlighting stuff like drawings, etc. is easier (just draw a recrangle with 30% opacity). Unlike Okular, changes aren’t baked in and unlike Draw, it’s easier to play around with colors and opacity.
LibreOffice Draw can do markup and much more, the downside like OP mentioned is that sometimes the formatting of the PDF can get messed up so it’s a bit hit-or-miss.
Beyond that try Firefox (yes the web browser), its PDF markup capabilities are way better than you’d expect and the PDF formatting tends to stay intact. It’s probably better than LibreOffice for simple markup stuff, I just wish Firefox included a way to draw straight lines/arrows and shapes (circles, squares, etc.) to complete the markup toolbox. It does have a pen and highlighter but drawing an arrow via mouse looks a bit janky, LOL.
If you do a lot of the same type of markup (say an arrow pointed right) you could probably just save an image of an arrow and keep pasting it into the Firefox PDF editor, it’ll probably look better vs drawing them out.
Thanks for the tips! I did try Firefox and it was okay but like you say, missing clouding etc. I never tried libre office draw so I’ll give that a go next time I need to markup a drawing.
if you’re good at desktop publishing, you can make draw work. i’ve done it a couple of times for apartment leases.
Unfortunately it sounds like all the tools you need to properly make a redline CAD drawing are exactly what’s missing in Firefox.
OnlyOffice
Try Stirling PDF maybe
