Are there any decent programs for pdf viewing and editing for Linux that replace Adobe Acrobat?

15 points by oceanhaiyang

Alternate title:How is there still no decent Linux replacement for Adobe Acrobat (pdf viewing and editing)?

There are plenty of viewing programs, some page editing programs, but simply nothing that also allows actual image editing, outline creation, etc. PDF4QT does some of these but is not ideal.

saturnyx

Okular if you use QT, Gnome Papers if you like GTK. I have always felt that these two did almost everything a PDF viewer needs to do. For PDF editing, Libreoffice Draw has always been my go to. There are a few other niche PDF editors or viewers and they have their uses. For example,

Zathura seemed pretty good for minimalism and efficiency
Gnome Atril if you are a GTK 3 or MATE user
ONLYOFFICE is just a Libreoffice alternative
Xournal++ is nice if you do handwritten notes

kiyurica

For handwriting, I've used Rnote before and other than some rough edges here and there, It's quite nice to use. It's like Xournalpp but it has infinite pages in both x and y directions and supports the Xournalpp file format.
kiyurica

For handwriting, I've used Rnote before and other than some rough edges here and there, It's quite nice to use. It's like Xournalpp but it has infinite pages in both x and y directions and supports the Xournalpp file format.

Fingel

Firefox is surprisingly capable of both viewing and editing PDFs these days.

hoistbypetard

I have not used it myself, but a former colleague swears by Master PDF Editor. It's proprietary and paid (though much less expensive than Acrobat).

I've used Stirling PDF for some simple edits. It's a web app that's MIT and easy enough to self-host.

adrien

There are some very good tools that are not graphical. I don't know if they fit your definition of a replacement; I concur that some operations on visual material are easier with visual tools.

Others have mentioned visual tools already but for the non-visual ones, coherentpdf is really good and too little known even though it's quite widely packaged: https://github.com/coherentgraphics/cpdf-binaries#coherent-pdf-command-line-tools-binaries

I've worked on huge PDF files with cpdf and it performed really well (e.g. create 2000 pages from raw text in a couple seconds where others needed minutes or hours).

ilyagr

Printing is going out of fashion, but I've been sad that I haven't found a Linux (or macOS) equivalent to https://www.priprinter.com/ (or the similar https://fineprint.com/fp/). IMO, the printer driver part is a distraction, it could easily convert PDF -> PDF.

The closest cross-platform analogue I've found is https://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/, which is separately pretty cool: it tries to do everything automatically, and focuses on the turn-pdf-into-ebook-with-smaller-pages usecase. It is a bit weird in terms of UI, it doesn't follow any CLI convention but its own, but AI can drive it well, or you can use something like https://github.com/ilyagr/rebook/tree/ilya (warning: this is my personal fork with some bugs fixed up, but possibly others added).

But I'd love one where I can adjust the margin sizes for odd and even pages in a GUI with the program picking the right aspect ratio depending on whether I'm doing 1-up or 2-upping of pages (in case of Letter, it doesn't matter for lucky A4 users) or putting it on my e-reader.

olex

I really like Sioyek it's vim of pdf/ebook readers.

kwas

Praxis is viewing using Sumatra PDF via wine.

scriptiz

Xournal++ can be used to annotate PDFs and fill forms.