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Open source PDF readers, creators, and editors
Open source alternatives to Adobe Acrobat for PDFs
16 Jun 2016 Jason Baker (Red Hat) Feed 2613up 33 comments
Open source PDF readers and editors
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Do you still use Acrobat for working with PDFs?

Choices
Yes, I use Acrobat.
No, I've switched to an open source alternative.
Aren't we supposed to be living in a paperless world by now?

I can't be the only person who imagined the office of the future, free from the
confines of the eight and a half by eleven sheet (or A4, for my international
friends), would have long since arrived. Instead, we've managed to land in an
intermediate state of not paperless, but less paper.

It could be worse.

Between a trusty scanner, email and various other communication tools, and getting
really good at organizing my digital archives, I'm not totally unhappy with where
we are today. And I do occasionally admit to reading a paper book, sending a
postcard, or (gasp) printing something off to give to someone else.

Until the world moves a little further from paper, print-ready file formats will
continue to permeate our digital landscape as well. And, love it or hate it, PDF,
the "portable document format," seems to be the go-to format for creating and
sharing print-ready files, as well as archiving files that originated as print.

For years, the only name in the game for working with PDF documents was Adobe
Acrobat, whether in the form of their free reader edition or one of their paid
editions for PDF creation and editing. But today, there are numerous open source
PDF applications which have chipped away at this market dominance. And for Linux
users like me, a proprietary application that only runs on Windows or Mac isn't an
option anyway.

Since PDF files are used in so many different situations for so many different
kinds of purposes, you may need to shop around to find the open source alternative
to Adobe Acrobat that meets your exact needs. Here are some tools I enjoy.
Reading PDFs
For reading PDFs, these days many people get by without having to use an external
application at all. Both Firefox and Chromium, the open source version of Google's
Chrome browser, come bundled with in-browser PDF readers, so an external plugin is
no longer necessary for most users.

For downloaded files, users of GNOME-based Linux distributions have Evince, a

powerful PDF reader that handles most documents quickly and with ease, while KDE's
Okular serves a similar purpose. Evince has a Windows port as well, although
Windows users may also want to check out the GPLv3-licensed SumatraPDF as an
alternative.

Creating PDFs
Personally, LibreOffice's export functionality ends up being the source of 95% of
the PDFs I create that weren't built for me by a web application. Scribus,
Inkscape, and GIMP all support native PDF export, too, so no matter what kind of
document you need to make -- a complex layout, formatted text, vector or raster
image, or some combination -- there's an open source application that meets your
needs.

For, well, practically every other application, the CUPS printing system does a
pretty good job of outputting documents as PDFs.

Editing PDFs
Ah, this is where things start to get tricky. Or at least where they used to. The
world has changed a bit and it turns out that recent versions of LibreOffice Draw
do a fantastic job of editing PDF files, and not just adding and deleting pages as
you might expect, but for editing text and images as well (so long as your PDF was
created directly from a source document and not from a scan). It's not perfect, and
I've had it choke up on a few more complex documents, but I'm still impressed with
what a good job it does on many of the documents I've had to work with.

Inkscape, too, does a good job with opening documents created elsewhere, and may be
a more intuitive choice if your document is heavy on graphics. There are standalone
tools as well, like the GPLv2 licensed PDFedit, but I've had such good luck with
Inkscape and LibreOffice that I haven't had to use a separate editor in recent
years.

We know these aren't the only choices in town. Do you work with a lot of PDFs? Have
a favorite application to help you along the way? Let us know in the comments below
what you use and why it works for you.

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Topics
AlternativesTools
About the authorJason Baker - I use technology to make the world more open. Linux
desktop enthusiast. Map/geospatial nerd. Raspberry Pi tinkerer. Data analysis and
visualization geek. Occasional coder. Cloud nativist. Civic tech and open
government booster.
More about me
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33 Comments
elnino
Nino Vrane�ic on 16 Jun 2016
What about digital signing in open source alternatives? Is this available?

Vote up!1
Ruvenss G. Wilches
Ruvenss G. Wilches on 16 Jun 2016
I totally agree wit Nino, unfortunately governments around the world has been
lobyed to use Adobe Digital Signature in tax declarations, and others, blame our
corrupt and incapable politicians who 99% of the time think that the internet can
be contained in a black box and a firewall is real wall enveloped with fire.

Vote up!2
Jason Baker
Jason Baker on 16 Jun 2016
Check out SignServer (https://www.signserver.org/) or jSignPdf
(http://jsignpdf.sourceforge.net/) to see if they meet your needs. So often the
digital signing requirements for PDFs are defined not by the individual user, but
by the originating organization who sent the document, such that unfortunately end
users have little control over the tools.

Vote up!2
elnino
Nino Vrane�ic on 16 Jun 2016
Thank you for reply. I Will try and report.

This is the only reason I still need to use Adobe.

Vote up!0
Camilla
Camilla on 20 Jun 2016
Digital signing is also a feature in LibreOffice Draw :)

Vote up!2
Larry Bradley
larrybradley on 30 Jul 2016
I use open-source alternatives for virtually everything I do with PDF's, EXCEPT
document conversion. There are some decent cloud alternatives for pdf-to-other-
format conversions; unfortunately, there is no open-source alternative that comes
close to Adobe or other Windows-only software packages (OmniPage is my current
favorite paid program) when it comes to complex -- or sometimes even moderately
complex -- document conversion. BTW, this discussion, like many others, seems to
assume that Adobe is the only viable commercial pdf package; not so, IMO, there are
other packages that are just as good, if not better. Why not make this discussion
about paid vs. unpaid, not OpenSource versus Adobe?

Vote up!0
davidpwhelan
David Whelan on 16 Jun 2016
I use PDF SAM all the time (http://www.pdfsam.org/). It's an easy utility to use
for splitting or merging PDFs. I use it to create an expense report PDF, for
example, bringing together invoices and statements from a bunch of different
sources. Other than digital signing (which, like @Nino, I haven't found in an open
source viewer yet), it's the thing I do most often with PDFs.

Vote up!0
mjjzf
Morten Juhl-Johansen Z�lde-Fej�r on 16 Jun 2016
I use PDFSAM a lot as well.
I have written it into some of our workflows in my job, and I completed the Danish
translation to be able to give something back.

Vote up!0
jimmysjolund
Jimmy Sj�lund on 16 Jun 2016
Lately I've switched from LIbreOffice to LateX or Markdown. The LaTeX editor ports
to PDF directly. My markdown notes I run through Pandoc.

Vote up!1
Shawn H Corey
Shawn H Corey on 16 Jun 2016
Recently, I have switched to Okular for reading because it allows text
highlighting. https://okular.kde.org/

Vote up!1
Don Watkins
Don Watkins on 16 Jun 2016
I use Evince most of the time since it's what comes with Ubuntu. One of the very
reasons I loved OpenOffice and now LibreOffice is the ability to easily export any
document into a PDF. Linux and Unix have very good command line utilities for
reading and writing PDF files too.

Vote up!0
billg
billg on 16 Jun 2016
A Gtk PDF reader based on PyMuPDF: https://gitlab.com/mozbugbox/youshen

Vote up!0
Alan
Alan on 16 Jun 2016
Master PDF is my go-to program for editing pdf's. By far the most versatile and
complete pdf editor I've found that runs on KDE. The only drawback is that you
can't select multiple documents when merging files.
Not open source but free to use on linux. They even gave me a key for the 'other
os' version when I reported a bug so I dumped adobe completely.

Vote up!1
GNUguy
paul on 16 Jun 2016
I almost always use Okular to read PDFs. However, I have been using Acrobat to
create PDFs from scans.

A while ago I had done a project where I scanned 15 years worth of a company's
newspaper (large format; ie, 11x17). I used Acrobat to index all the scans to
create a searchable library. Is there an open source solution for something like
that?

Vote up!0
Stephen Paul Weber
Stephen Paul Weber on 16 Jun 2016
Inkscape can only open a single page of a PDF

Vote up!0
Jason Baker
Jason Baker on 17 Jun 2016
Good point. For me, the one only time I need to make detailed changes to vector-
based PDFs are when the subject matter is a landscape or site plan or other map, so
exporting just the page that needs editing (if there even are multiple pages) is
not much of a problem -- I'm generally editing one page in much detail. But for
people with other use cases I could imagine that being a frustration, and a good
reason to use Draw instead.

Vote up!0
Platypus
Platypus on 16 Jun 2016
I use Foxit Reader 7 under CrossOver (Wine). Works well and I can edit! There Linux
version is a very poor cousin.

Vote up!0
ttoine
Antoine Thomas on 17 Jun 2016
You just forget Scribus, the only open source document editor that manages well
CMYK document for printing.

Vote up!0
Jason Baker
Jason Baker on 17 Jun 2016
Thanks, Scribus is actually mentioned under the "creating" section -- I don't have
a need to manage precise print color but that's a good point for anyone who does.

Vote up!0
bjrosen
bjrosen on 17 Jun 2016
You forgot to mention Atril, that's the best Linux PDF reader, much better than
Evince.

Vote up!1
Stefan
Stefan on 17 Jun 2016
For reading pdf-files under Linux I use Atril (the Mint "fork" of Evince) most of
the time. For splitting or merging of pdf-files I use pdfsam (available for Linux
and Windows). For converting scanned images (mostly scientific papers) into
searchable pdf-files I use gscan2pdf. It can use either tesseract or cuneiform for
doing the ocr - both with mostly very poor results. I have read that tesseract is
the "best" ocr-program on Linux but is miles away from "professional" (closed
source) solutions like FineReader 10 years back (sorry to say that). I have also
tried and used tesseract from the command line with the same poor results (although
the scans were of high quality around 600 dpi and without artefacts). Tesseract has
massive problems in recognising the page layout (even from pages with only a single
cloumn - not to speak of multicolumn pages) and its capability of correctly
recognising single characters is bad as well (even if you have chosen the correct
language for the text). I have read somewhere, that tesseract has been far better
in the past, but that the developers have broken it (not sure, if that is true).
Tools like OCR Feeder also offer to save a scanned text image with a text layer -
but for me, this does not work (the program completely fails to save a pdf-file at
all, searchable or not).
I also sometimes use Master PDF for editing pdfs - mainly for inserting bookmarks
for navigation within the document. It looks like, no other open source pdf-
editing-solution can do this (Libre/OpenOffice inserts bookmarks from headers when
saving a document as pdf, but when you attach additional pages to the pdf-file, you
may want to add additional bookmarks).

Vote up!1
David Topham
David Topham on 17 Jun 2016
I use pdflatex to create pdfs. It is a great program and can embed video and insert
hyperlinks. My only frustration is that ONLY acrobat can access those links! I
believe the issue is support for javascript from the pdf but I am not sure and hope
someone will make a Linux alternative eventually.

Vote up!1
Don Watkins
Don Watkins on 18 Jun 2016
There is an extension for Firefox called PDFEscape which will allow you to edit
PDFs as weel.

Vote up!1
gonzalo.san.gil
Gonzalo San Gil, PhD on 18 Jun 2016
# ! PDFedit: http://pdfedit.cz/en/index.html

Vote up!1
Greg P
Greg Pittman on 20 Jun 2016
Where Scribus shines is with complex layout of text and images and its ability to
very precisely handle fonts and color.
It can also import PDFs as vector drawings, or more precisely groups of vector
graphics, which can be ungrouped and edited as vector drawings.
Currently there is also work going on to be able to handle complex text layout with
non-Latin languages and fonts.

Vote up!1
Larry Bradley
larrybradley on 21 Jun 2016
In limited circumstances, I use Google Docs to convert pdf files with
straightforward, simple pdf files. I also use CloudConvert, an add-on to Google
Drive. The latter works surprisingly well, even with fairly complicated documents.
It is free for limited conversions, minimal cost for on-going bulk conversions.

Vote up!0
mhanwell
Marcus D. Hanwell on 21 Jun 2016
I didn't know about some of the recent progress in editing PDFs, I use pdflatex a
lot, but also a number of other editing tools that support export to PDF.

Vote up!0
Arie Morgenstern
Arie Morgenstern on 12 Jul 2016
What about creating PDFs from the command prompt or opening a PDF with a Viewer
from the command prompt? Do you have recommendations for command-prompt-friendly
PDF tools?

Vote up!1
Jason Baker
Jason Baker on 13 Jul 2016
Good question! This isn't an area I've explored much personally but I'd be really
interested to do a little exploring and find out what the available tools in this
area are. Do you have one that you like in particular?

Vote up!1
Dennis Fowler
Dennis Fowler on 28 Jul 2016
I needed to convert a PDF image to JPG and found Image Magick (www.imagemagick.org)
worked well. I suppose technically it's not what you mean, since it is used to
create, edit, compose, or convert bitmap images, but it worked for me.

Vote up!0
jon.d.slavin
Jon Slavin on 28 Jul 2016
I've found pdftk (pdf toolkit) very nice for splicing together pieces of several
different pre-existing pdfs. It's a command line tool. See
.https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/

Vote up!0
zoedtdt
zoedtdt on 05 Aug 2016
I'm not a developer, i always use this free online image to pdf converter online
merge from pdfcoding.com http://www.pdfcoding.com/online/pdf/convert-jpeg-images-
to-pdf/.

Vote up!0
Samrat Chitta
Samrat Chitta on 25 Aug 2016
Hi, I am looking for a open source solution for creating pdfs or documents on which
we can have control on options like "save" , "printing" etc , so that i can either
disabling/enabling those options.

Vote up!0
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