Any good recommendations for PDF editors/tools to comment on PDFs. Essentially whats the OSS alternative to Adobe acrobat? I’m a TA and need to give students feedback on reports and haven’t found something that easy to use so just wanted to see what the community recommends.
If you need advanced modifications, Inkscape is surprisingly capable!
If the reports are somewhat technical (written with Latex for example), check out sioyek: https://sioyek.info/. It’s a PDF reader mainly for academic use.
Sioyek has made reading and reviewing papers SO much easier and it’s really, really convenient… once you get the hang of it. It takes a bit of time to get used to all the things, but it’s worth it. I also review students’ theses with it. Highlighting colors and adding comments is super easy (select text, h+g (green highlight), type comment).
If you have want to export your notes and comments, you will need this script though: https://github.com/ahrm/sioyek/blob/main/scripts/embedded_annotations.py
If you need more than just basic annotations, you can edit PDFs with LibreOffice Draw. PDFs aren’t intended to be editable, so nothing is going to be like editing the original document unless the PDF was created with LibreOffice and exported as a hybrid PDF.
Zotero. Syncs even between different devices. Bibliography and annotation. Great.
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Okular is the way to go for anything that’s typed, it has a lot more capabilities than Evince. For handwriting, I’ve used Inkscape, and Libreoffice Draw. They’re roughly similar in capabilities.
Try evince.
Papers or Zathura (+ required plugin)
Master PDF Editor is one of two proprietary apps I currently have running on my laptop, and I would definitely say it’s worth the price (although once in a while when they update they manage to mess something up, but will usually get around to fixing it eventually).
This was quite a long time ago, but I had a lot of issues with Okular, though I don’t remember what exactly (one thing was that if you changed a document’s location, Okular would lose all the bookmarks you added to it, but they may have changed it since then, IDK). Evince’s commenting features seem a bit rudimentary to me, but I’ve only used the one from the Mint repo, so there may be a newer version that’s better.
There’s also PDF4QT which is open source, but is kind of new and may be a bit rough around the edges, although it does look promising.
stirling pdf is self hostable i run a instance
Zathura
Not long after this post, BentoPDF made an appearance
