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Ask HN: How is there not a full-featured open-source PDF editor/viewer?

9 pointsby escaperover 6 years ago
For almost anything you can think of there is a pretty awesome open source version of that software but for the life of me I can't find a truly full featured PDF editor that's 100% free. As PDF technology has been the preferred document of business for the last 15+ years I'm really surprised there isn't at least one open source project that's been a mainstay in this niche?!? What am I missing?

6 comments

wizzerkingover 6 years ago
FRom <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensource.com&#x2F;alternatives&#x2F;adobe-acrobat" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opensource.com&#x2F;alternatives&#x2F;adobe-acrobat</a><p>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&#x27;s not perfect, and I&#x27;ve had it choke up on a few more complex documents, but I&#x27;m still impressed with what a good job it does on many of the documents I&#x27;ve had to work with.<p>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&#x27;ve had such good luck with Inkscape and LibreOffice that I haven&#x27;t had to use a separate editor in recent years. So there are FOSS PDF editors, and LibreOffice certainly allows you to export to PDF virtually everything
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newnewpdroover 6 years ago
The last few times I&#x27;ve had to edit a PDF I used xournal.<p>I haven&#x27;t used any proprietary tools on other systems to compare, but maybe it&#x27;s satisfactory. It&#x27;s worked fine for what I&#x27;ve needed to do.
kgwxdover 6 years ago
What would you want it to do? Aren&#x27;t PDFs usually created from non-PDF sources? I imagine it would basically recreate Word.
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new_guyover 6 years ago
Because you&#x27;ve not written it yet? :p
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SQL2219over 6 years ago
I think there is some issue with licensing from Adobe on this. Someone who knows more than me might educate us.
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Loranubiover 6 years ago
On Windows I use Sumatra PDF which is a great viewer. It uses the MuPDF library.