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.
I did not know this, thanks.
Firefox. Firefox can draw, sign, highlight, add text in boxes, add pictures. This should be recommended more.
Libre office Draw also works for basic editing
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?
My version also seems to be 1.3.2. When I select (*.pdf) from the export panel, it lets me select all the pages at once, which results in a single PDF.
If you have libreOffice installed I believe you can edit pdfs in Draw.
You can also try Inkscape.
I like Okular, but I also use Xournal++.
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.
If you are trying to mark something sensitive out, make sure that you are deleting the actual text or convert the PDF to a flat image after. PDFs can store information in text and images, so if you just draw over some text thinking you are marking it out, there is a chance that the mark out is just a image layer sitting on top of the sensitive text. A way to check this is opening the PDF in Firefox after and toggle Reader View (button in the address bar or F9) to see if you can still see to marked out information.
Is there a way to bring it back to a PDF after?
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.
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’ve used Xournal++ before for adding things like signatures to pdfs
PDF Studio by Qoppa, paid (lifetime subscription) but fantastic, native Linux: https://www.qoppa.com/pdfstudio/
Overkill for this but just wanted to mention
stirlingtools.com/ (self-hosted PDF magic)
