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I know that there is a very similar question, but I'm not interested in highlighting. What I'm looking for is some tool in Linux to edit pdf files. I've tried pdfedit which did the work for me, but if freezes after a few edits. I've tried this tool under Ubuntu 9.10 and under KDE Fedora 14 and the same thing happens. I've tried Okular but the notations are too big to fill out exercises from pdf workbooks.

Is there any tool that suits this job? I don't care whether it is open source or I have to pay a reasonable price for it.

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I have just discovered that LibreOffice Draw does very good job editing PDF files. I have test it with some PDF files created with Adobe InDesign and Illustrator. – Елин Й. Apr 17 at 11:46

7 Answers

up vote 14 down vote accepted

For PDF editing I have used a PDF Annotator flpsed Install flpsed . You are able to save edited files in postscript format or in PDF.

Good luck

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1  
Simple, but works nicely and smoothly. After you type your annotation it's easy to place it in the right place. It also respected the document layout. – Chuck Dec 8 '10 at 20:23
I can't say I agree with Chuck. I found flpsed to be very slow and most importantly not very gracious in handling PDF files. Exported documents are saved as bitmaps and loose all vector and text information. – Glutanimate Apr 18 at 6:59
up vote 10 down vote

Here they wrote: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=829479, that PDF Import extension to OpenOffice.org may do what you want.

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Thank you, it seems to be working so far. It opens the file with Draw though. – Chuck Dec 8 '10 at 17:29
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You should pay attention to big tables incorporated in PDF files. A PDF Import Extension sometimes make some shifts (position distorsion) in text or tables structure. – Vincenzo Dec 8 '10 at 18:18
Yeah, there are two details to keep in mind with this extension. First, it changed the document layout because of position shifting. Second, when using Draw to fill out some documents it's hard to position the text in the right place. – Chuck Dec 8 '10 at 20:18
LibreOffice has the import pdf feature incorporated – cipricus Jun 7 '12 at 15:50
In Ubuntu 12.04: sudo apt-get install libreoffice-pdfimport.Worked very well for me indeed, allowing me to fill-in a pseudo-form (word-created form for humans, not a real pdf form) exactly at the right places by selecting the line of placeholder dots in the pdf. Better than a typewriter. – mivk Apr 19 at 18:33
up vote 19 down vote

Option 1:

  • Use calibre Install calibre to convert the pdf file to rtf.
  • Open the rtf file in OpenOffice.
  • Make changes and then create a pdf out of it.

Option 2:

  • PDF Studio is a complete PDF editor.But you have to pay for the developers as it is a commercial software.

Option 3:

  • Use scribus Install scribus it might be useful for complex visual edits.

Option 4:

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+1 for Xournal - what a nice tool! I like it!!! – B. Roland Apr 4 '11 at 19:30
calibre's conversion from PDF to RTF failed to reproduce the lines delineating tabular data. This is important since many of the PDF forms that users need to edit, or "fill in", will have grid lines. – broiyan Oct 7 '12 at 6:56
up vote 8 down vote

You can use pdfshuffler to delete pages and rearrange the pages if necessary.

It is available in software center. To install pdfshuffler, you can do

  sudo apt-get install pdfshuffler

Install via the software center

Description:

PDF-Shuffler is a small application which allows one to merge or split pdf documents and rotate, crop and rearrange their pages using an interactive and intuitive graphical interface.

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+1 for PDFshuffler. It's fast and easy to use. – Glutanimate Jan 31 at 18:26
up vote 5 down vote

PDF Mod

Remove, extract, and rotate pages in PDF documents

PDF Mod is a simple tool for modifying PDF documents. It can rotate, extract, remove and reorder pages via drag and drop. Multiple documents may be combined via drag and drop. You may also edit the title, subject, author and keywords of a PDF document using PDF Mod.

sudo apt-get install pdfmod

Install via the software center

Note: this application may require quite a few dependencies related to mono.

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up vote 1 down vote

The other way would be to use Libreoffice it has a Free PDF Import mod extension

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up vote 0 down vote

Cropping, specifically, can easily be done with BRISS, a cross-platform PDF editor.

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