The PDF format has become very popular with the development of the Internet and the spread of electronic documentation, and those who deal with texts have to select the tools to open files in this format and work with them. *nix supporters have plenty to choose from.

Reading PDF

PDF files are quite complex in their structure, they can contain text, graphics, attachments, be compressed and encrypted, so modern versions of the format cannot be read using standard Linux commands, cat, less, or a regular text editor like vi. To view and extract information, you must use a special program.

Adobe itself also releases a version of Adobe Reader for UNIX, but it hasn't been updated for a long time and is hardly of any interest. Most Linux distributions come with some sort of PDF reader installed by default, so there's no problem with that. On Ubuntu and clones, this is one of the best yet very simple Evince programs from the GNOME project, but it works great with any other window manager as well. Evince supports viewing - PDF, DjVu, TIFF, PostScript, DVI, XPS, SyncTex, Comics Books (cbr, cbz, cb7, cbt) and ODP presentations. Opens encrypted PDF documents. A document search has been implemented, several options for displaying the document structure (tree view, page thumbnails, and others), which allows you to quickly find the one you need. For PDF and DVI, you can select the desired piece of text and copy it to the clipboard, an arbitrary section of the page is saved as a picture. It is possible to set bookmarks, run in presentation mode and full screen, display one or two pages, zoom and rotate the page. Each document opens in a new window; if there are a lot of them, it can be inconvenient. In general, a very good viewer for PDF files, which does not require much resources.

You can find a few more alternatives in the repository. The most modern of them is a universal document viewer from the KDE Okular project, in addition to PDF, it supports PostScript, DjVu, CHM, XPS, ePub, CHM and some other formats. In terms of functions, it surpasses Evince, more options for viewing and navigating, there are even performance settings that allow you to set the optimal document output mode depending on the power of your computer.

Plus a number of lightweight viewers with a minimal interface, but not inferior in functionality - ePDFviewer, XPDF, MuPDF, Zathura and others. For example, Zathura and MuPDF have no buttons at all, they are controlled by keys (all of them are described in man), and the programs weigh less than a hundred kilobytes and fly even when loading large documents. In Zathura it is possible to save the current page to a graphic file or to save an image to the clipboard.

Console view

In general, everything is clear with the graphical environment, but it happens that a PDF file needs to be read in the console, but there is nothing at hand. There are two options here - a special viewer using framebuffer, and converting files to another format (text or HTML). For the first case, we need an image viewer through the fbi framebuffer and one of the PDF viewers - fbgs (Framebuffer Ghostscript Viewer), which is part of the fbi package or analogues - FBPDF, JFBPDF. In addition to PDF, fbgs also supports DjVu. The principle of operation is simple - an image is automatically generated from the pages of the document, which is displayed on the console. But you need to take into account that this method works for a real console, running it in a terminal emulator will result in an error. Installation:

$ sudo apt-get install fbi

To view the user must be added to the video group:

$ sudo usermod -a -G video user

Now you can watch:

$ fbgs file.pdf

Some time will have to wait until the images are generated.

PDF conversion

In most GUI programs, PDF is supported using the poppler library, which in turn is based on the code of the popular xpdf viewer. In addition to the library itself, the project offers 11 console utilities for working with PDF files that allow you to convert PDF to various formats (text, HTML, PPM, PS, PNG, JPEG, SVG) and extract title, attachments, images and fonts. The pdftohtml and pdftotext converters are just right for reading files in the console. Ubuntu usually has these utilities already installed. If you execute without specifying the name of the output file, or output to standard output, then a file with the same name and extension txt or html will be created in the current directory, which can then be opened in any editor or console browser (for example, Links or ELinks). Or just read:

$ pdftotext -layout file.pdf - | more

By the way, the Midnight Commander file manager in some distributions allows you to view PDF files. The script /usr/lib/mc/ext.d/doc.sh is responsible for this (described in /etc/mc/mc.ext). If you look at it, we will see that by default the file is converted to text using pdftotext and then displayed on the screen. Although other options are possible, so it's worth looking into doc.sh.
The utilities from poppler cover almost all major formats for converting and some processing of PDF files. So, PDF files can contain attachments, the pdfdetach utility allows you to list them and extract them:

$ pdfdetach -list file.pdf $ pdfdetach -saveall file.pdf

Similarly, one command extracts images.

$ pdfimages file.pdf images/

For information about embedded fonts, run the pdffonts utility.
In context, we can think of SWFTools, which contains several converters to SWF (Small Web Format), including PDF2SWF. The only point is that the SWFTools package in Ubuntu and some other distributions does not include the pdf2swf utility, so it has to be installed from sources:

$ pdf2swf in.pdf out.swf

As a result, a SWF file was obtained, opening which in a web browser or player we will see periodically replacing each other pages of the document. It is possible to process only a part of the document by specifying the numbers of favorite pages with the --pages option:

$ pdf2swf --pages 1.3-6 in.pdf out.swf

If you don't specify an output filename, the result will go to stdout. The -C option allows you to generate an additional HTTP header, which is useful when hosting a file on a web server.

Another useful utility distributed under the Artistic License, QPDF is a PDF converter that allows you to perform various conversions: web optimization, encryption/decryption, file verification, and merging and splitting. With it you can also create a PDF file programmatically, QPDF takes care of all the syntactic representation of objects, creating table cross-references, encryption, linearization and other syntax details.

When updating the version of Adobe Extension Level that is used when creating PDF files in the Adobe cloud, it is often impossible to read such files at first with programs other than Adobe Reader. This is where QPDF (and some other review utilities) comes to the rescue, it is enough to remove encryption from the file, and the issue with reading is removed. We look at the properties of the document using pdfinfo from the poppler kit:

$pdfinfoin.pdf | grep -i encrypted Encrypted: yes (print:no copy:no change:no addNotes:no algorithm:AES-256)

Removing encryption:

$ qpdf --decrypt in.pdf out.pdf $ pdfinfo in.pdf | grep -i encrypted Encrypted: no

Now there will be no problems with reading. If the file is password protected, then it must be specified using the --password option.

Merge and split PDF

When working with PDF, the task of assembling files from parts of separate documents or changing individual parameters, such as sheet size or orientation (portrait or landscape), often arises. Simple scripts allow you to do everything you need with just one command, but first you need to understand the basic utilities.

Poppler's pdfseparate and pdfunite utilities allow you to extract individual pages and merge documents. Moreover, among the others described below, they are the easiest to use, since they do not have a large number of options, and it is easy to understand their work. For example, extract pages 10 to 20 and save them in a separate document:

$ pdfseparate -f 10 -l 20 file.pdf file-%d.pdf

The %d variable in the name is required, since pdfseparate can only save pages to separate files. Instead, the page number will be substituted, that is, in our case, we will get files with the name file-10.pdf ... file-20.pdf. If you still need a single document, then pdfunite comes to the rescue. Let's combine pages 10 and 11 into one document:

$ pdfunit file-10.pdf file-11.pdf sample.pdf

QPDF has a lot of options and features, it is almost a universal utility for processing PDF files, and many operations are performed by one command. For example, we can save the necessary pages of one or more sources to a separate file:

$ qpdf in.pdf --pages in1.pdf 1-5 in2.pdf 20-31 --out.pdf

As a result, we get a file assembled from the complete document in.pdf and the specified pages of the documents in1.pdf and in2.pdf. The range can be specified with a hyphen or list pages separated by commas. Reverse is also possible using the z-page number design. By adding the --linearize parameter, we will generate web-optimized files. A special QDF mode (--qdf) allows you to create PDF files that can then be edited in a regular text editor, that is, without compression and encryption, normalized and with special labels. True, the size of such a file is at least twice as large.

Sometimes you just need to compare two versions of a PDF file - text, pictures, attachments. Two excellent utilities will help here: diffpdf and comparepdf. In the simplest case:

$ comparepdf file1.pdf file2.pdf

As a result, we get the difference. If the files are the same, then the command will not produce anything (the "-v 2" option will make it a little more chatty). Diffpdf is a GUI program that allows you to perform pagination of a document. If there is no discrepancy, empty fields will be shown after the run.

$diffpdf file1.pdf file2.pdf

If necessary, diffpdf can set check ranges. This is useful if, for example, a page has been added to the document, and therefore paging after it will definitely show a mismatch.

Not all users like to deal with numerous options and experiment, some prefer to simply select the desired operations in the GUI. No problems. PDF-Shuffler is a small Python-GTK application to the pyPdf Python library that provides all the functions for working with PDF: extract, merge, crop, encrypt/decrypt, and more. The program is in the distribution repository:

$ sudo apt-get install pdfshuffler

The interface is not localized, but all that is required after launch is to throw the files into the program window, and after all the pages of the document are displayed, use the menu to delete, crop, rotate, export the necessary ones. If you want to perform an operation with several pages at once, then simply mark them with the Ctrl key pressed, and then save the result to a new document. Fast and very convenient. True, as you can see, PDF-Shuffler does not use all the features of the library, for example, there is no optimization and encryption / decryption, other transformations such as resizing the sheet cannot be performed. Therefore, it does not completely replace console utilities. By the way, pyPdf, on which PDF-Shuffler is based, is no longer being developed, and today in distributions it happens to be replaced by a fork of PyPDF2, which is fully compatible with the original, plus contains several new methods.

PDF-Shuffler alternatives include PDF Mod, a lightweight, very easy-to-use application with a localized interface that allows you to extract, delete pages, rearrange pages, rotate, merge multiple documents, export images on a selected page, and edit document header information ( titles, keywords, author). Bookmarks are supported. PDF Mod is in the repository:

$ sudo apt-get install pdfmod

Cross-platform utility PDFsam - PDF Split And Merge, written in Java, can merge, cut and rotate PDF documents. And in burst mode, it generates separate files from PDF pages. The repository is far from the latest and very buggy version. New releases are already devoid of many shortcomings, so it's better to install from the official site, but you will have to compile a little, because without payment, developers offer only assembly for Win and source code.

PDF editing

PDF itself is a complex format designed for publishing products, requiring special tools for creation and editing. And *nix users have plenty to choose from. You can create a PDF document in Open/LibreOffice, and to be able to edit it, you must install the Oracle PDF Import Extension . In addition, special applications are available - PDFedit, Scribus and Master PDF Editor. Among them, Scribus is a very powerful application with many features that takes time to master.

Master PDF Editor is a very simple tool distributed free of charge for non-commercial use. PDFedit allows you to make any corrections to PDF documents. Built-in tools make it possible to edit text and graphics, but are not friendly with tables. Automation using ECMAScript scripts is possible. Unfortunately, PDFedit, which uses Qt 3, has been removed in the current version of Ubuntu due to the lack of support for the libqt3-mt package, and installation attempts are not always successful. The Qt 4 version is still under development.

PDFtk utility

In the context of working with PDF, I would like to highlight Sid Steward's PDFtk utility. This is not even a utility, but an all-in-one combiner that allows you to split or combine multiple documents into one, decrypt / encrypt a PDF file, add or remove attachments, fill out forms, recover damaged documents, and much more. In general, the developers offer several solutions, the basis of all is the PDFtk Server console utility, which is discussed further. For Win users, the developers offer a GUI. Plus, two more utilities are available: GNU Barcode Plus PDF to generate a barcode in a PDF file and a paid STAMPtk that generates watermarks and headers and footers in a PDF file. The PDFtk package is already in the distribution repositories, so there are no problems with installation. Together with the command, you should specify the name of the input and output files (mask is supported), the command, and parameters. A total of 18 commands are supported, all of which are described in the documentation. I will give just a few examples that are sufficient to understand the essence of working with PDFtk. For example, the cat command allows you to combine several files into a third one - outfile.pdf:

$ pdftk in1.pdf in2.pdf cat output out.pdf

If there are many files, then it is easier to collect them in one directory and use the *.pdf mask. Individual pages are cut simply by specifying their numbers after cat:

$ pdftk in.pdf cat 10-20 output page3.pdf

Moreover, if there are several files, each page is assigned its own pages, if necessary, the orientation is changed.

$ pdftk A=in1.pdf B=in2.pdf cat A1east B2-20even output out.pdf

In the example, the first page will be extracted from the document in1.pdf and will be rotated 90 degrees. Only even pages in the range 2-20 are retrieved from the second document. Parity can be specified as even (even) or odd (odd), rotation is specified as north, south, east, west, left, right or down. The last page of a document can be specified using the end keyword. The range is specified either directly, as in the example, or reversely (for example, end-1). To decompose a PDF into pages, use the burst command.

$ pdftk in.pdf burst output out%03d.pdf

As a result, we get several documents like out001.pdf. Sometimes you need to tweak the metadata left in a PDF by another program. This is easy to do with PDFtk. First, let's extract the original data:

$ pdftk in.pdf dump_data output metadata.txt

Now we open and edit metadata.txt in a text editor, and then load it back:

$ pdftk in.pdf update_info metadata.txt output incopy.pdf

PDF decryption, which we talked about above, is the work of one team:

$ pdftk secured.pdf input_pw password output unsecured.pdf

PDF recovery:

$ pdftk broken.pdf output fixed.pdf

Output

In fact, these are far from all utilities for working with PDF files. The issue of generating PDF from various sources is practically not affected. But most solutions are easy to find in the repository. PostScript conversion gives you even more control over your content.

Author: LinuxAndUbuntu
Publication date: November 6, 2016
Translation: A. Krivoshey
Date of transfer: December 2017

For the past 15 years, PDF has been the de facto standard for sharing, emailing, and printing documents. This is a well-supported format, and Linux distributions have always supported reading it. The only problem is that Adobe Acrobat Pro is available for Windows and MacOS, but there is no version for Linux. However, there are some good PDF editors on Linux, and I decided to check them out.

For this article, I tested a variety of PDF editors for Linux, both open source and proprietary, using two PDF documents: one created by Wikipedia, and a large PDF from Adobe with many pages and images to see how each program handles them. This way, readers will be able to see what happens when each of the programs edits the PDF.

Currently, most Linux distributions come with LibreOffice pre-installed, or it can be easily installed through the program control center or the app store. A couple of years ago or so, the LibreOffice Draw component finally got the ability to import and edit PDF files.

Correctly enough imported the PDF-file created in Wikipedia. It was far from perfect, but easy to read. Unfortunately, he could not win a large PDF with a bunch of images. Draw crashed every time and I couldn't open and edit this PDF at all.

The good news is that Draw is quite good at importing PDFs created by office suites such as Microsoft Office and LibreOffice. I've done this many times before. Thus, in many but the most complex cases, Draw works quite well.

An excellent vector graphics program and it is used daily by graphic design professionals around the world. I highly recommend it for this kind of work, and best of all, it can import and edit PDFs! It might be a good Linux PDF editor. We'll see!

Inkscape was able to import both test documents very well and accurately. The only gripe is that Inkscape is not a multi-page document editor like Word or LibreOffice Draw, so it only imports one page at a time. However, this didn't bother me, as I've already had to edit many PDF files page by page in the past, simply by joining all the pages together with a tool like pdftk.

The first proprietary application on this list is a near-perfect replacement for Adobe Acrobat Pro. It runs on Linux, Windows and Mac and is commercially supported.

It flawlessly (as far as I could tell) imported any PDF I could find, including things like annotations and fonts, and I could edit whatever I wanted. This is a quality product, and in my opinion, if you decide to buy it, you will not waste your money.

The second proprietary app on our list is also paid. PDF Studio 11 is positioned as a complete replacement for Adobe Acrobat Pro. It is also a mature application with commercial support.

As far as I can tell, the Pro version offers all the features that Adobe Acrobat Pro and Master PDF Editor have, and opened test documents just as flawlessly as Master PDF Editor did. It's also a quality product that you'll probably love if you decide to buy it.

5.PDF Chain

This list would not be complete without mentioning the pdftk utility and the best Linux GUI for it - .

It is a simple yet powerful application, but it is not a fully featured image editor like the other applications listed here - its purpose is slightly different. PDF Chain can split a PDF into multiple documents or merge two into one. It can add backgrounds, stamps, or edit PDF file information, or export form data to PDF, and more.

All in all, a really great app if you don't need to edit text or images in a PDF file. I highly recommend it.

Master PDF Editor is the ultimate PDF editor for Linux. With it, you can create, edit, view, encrypt, sign and print interactive PDF documents.

PDF editor.

You can edit or add text to the document with any formatting, insert images into the document, edit any objects in the PDF file.

Commenting PDF.

Annotate documents using stamps, notes, highlight, strikethrough or underline text and other tools.

PDF forms.

Fast and easy PDF form filling. Adding and editing PDF controls (like buttons, checkboxes, lists, etc.)

How to start editing PDF documents

• Open the document in Master PDF Editor.
• Click in the main menu Tools -> Document Editing.
• Select the image or text you want to edit.
• Master PDF Editor will show the properties of the selected object in the Object Inspector.
• You can delete, move or resize the selected objects.
• Use the menu Insert -> Text, Image or Shapes -> Link, Text field, Button, etc. to add new objects to the file.
• Select from the main menu Document -> Text Recognition, Headers, Footers, Page Size or Watermark for professional document editing.

The unregistered version may only be used for personal and non-commercial purposes to read documents, fill out PDF forms, annotate documents and print them. To use the program for commercial purposes and with full functionality, you must purchase a license.

Comparison of the functionality of the unregistered and licensed versions:

Function	Free version	Commercial version
Create a new PDF document	+	+
Filling out PDF forms.	+	+
Adding and/or editing bookmarks in PDFs.	+	+
Ability to split and merge PDF files.	+	+
Commenting on PDF documents.	+	+
Editing text and images in PDF files. Creation of PDF forms.	+	+
Editing global events in a document.	-	+
Editing global JavaScript in a document.	-	+
"Insert on multiple pages" feature.	-	+
Optimization of PDF documents.	-	+
Editing page properties.	-	+
Signing a PDF with a digital signature.	-	+
Adding headers and footers to a document.	-	+
Adding a watermark to a document.	-	+
Adding a background to a document.	-	+
Encryption with a 256-bit key.	-	+

How to change pdf document? This is not a trivial question that dozens of people ask search engines every day. And the thing is that the pdf format is one of the most common formats and many books and documents on the Internet are presented in PDF.

But changing something in pdf is not so easy, since in fact it is not a simple text document, but an image of a document. And therefore, special programs are needed to edit pdf, which, of course, are available both in Linux and Windows.

Before we talk about programs that are designed to edit pdf files, it is worth noting that pdf files are different. Some pdf files are exclusively images that cannot only be edited, but even text cannot be copied from.

If we just need to extract text from a pdf file, then for this we need to recognize this pdf document using a special program. Here I already wrote, in Linux. After recognizing a pdf document, you can save it again in pdf, but now you can copy the text from it.

But most often we need something completely different: we need to edit a pdf document. This is usually necessary in cases where we need to fill out a form created specifically in PDF format. How to change pdf document?

How can you edit pdf on Linux?

Linux has a program for editing and modifying pdf files - PDF MOD. Let's install it and see what it is. To install the program, you need to add an additional repository:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pdfmod-team/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install pdfmod

After installing the program, go to the menu Applications - Standard - PDF MOD.

After opening the program, you need to add a pdf document through the menu. The program will display it in this form, as shown in the figure above. After that, we open a specific page.

But alas, I was deeply disappointed with this program, since there are VERY few functions in it! In fact, you can only delete unnecessary pages or save the one you need separately. It is impossible to edit the pdf file itself in this program. And why was it made at all? But let's not be sad, because there is a great alternative to this program that can do much more. And it will be discussed further.

How to edit pdf in Windows?

Although I wrote in this subheading about how to edit a PDF document in Windows, in fact, what I will write will only have an indirect relation to Windows. And the thing is that the program that I will offer you further for editing a pdf document is written for Windows.

But this program just works fine on Linux via Wine. So why not use it for your own purposes? How to change a pdf file in Linux with this program and what is this program?

And this program is called PDF-XChange Viewer. You can download it from the developers website at this link: PDF-XChange. The program installs fine through Wine.

As you can see, the program has a lot of tools for editing pdf documents. Personally, I like the "typewriter" feature, which allows you to type text anywhere in the document. This is especially useful when you are printing letterhead.

The program has many other functions, but it makes no sense to talk about them all. You can download the program yourself and test it on your Linux. Yes, and for Windows lovers, this program will be the best for editing pdf, since, unlike many similar ones, it is free.

Another PDF editor...

There is another program that was suggested to me in the comments - Master PDF Editor. According to many, this is the best pdf editing program for linux. I'll try to install this pdf editing program for myself and personally check if this is so?

After installation, the program shortcut appears in the MENU - STANDARDS - Master PDF Editor. Open the program and immediately go to the TOOLS section.

Here we choose our interface language, of course, great and powerful. Now we have everything in Russian, which is immensely pleasing. Let's try to open a pdf file:

Well, in general, not bad, it works without brakes. There are many tools, but I did not find the most useful thing for me that PDF-XChange has - a typewriter, which is when you can type text over a document. Namely, this function is most important for me in the PDF editor. Maybe I haven't found it yet? We'll keep looking...

These are the programs you can edit PDF in Linux. Of course, there are other programs, but these will be quite enough to edit a pdf document. If you know better options, then write in the comments, I will be grateful!

Did not find an answer to your question? Use search...

5 comments

5 comments on the article “How to edit a pdf document?”

Unfortunately, good editors are not only proprietary, but also paid. And of semi-free software, the best in my opinion is "Master PDF Editor". It's in the Ubuntu Software Center. True, and there they offer to buy it in the Ubuntu One store. Do not do that! Follow the link from the App Center to the developer's site. There you will find the tar.gz archive of the program. This is a proprietary program, so the archive does not contain sources, but a fully compiled working version. After unpacking the archive where it is convenient for you, you will get the working folder of the program. Run the "pdfeditor" executable file from it and that's it! Russian language is supported. You can uninstall a program simply by deleting its folder. It is something like a portable program in Windows. Without unnecessary troubles with garbage in the system ...

Thanks for the valuable addition, I did not know about such a program. I myself do not often have to edit pdf, and PDF-XChange is enough for my eyes so far. But it still works through Wine, although it’s good, but it’s still crutches. I will download and add the article, thanks again.

A year has already passed, but you still have not completed the article, i.e. It turns out that the option proposed by @Valery Kustarev has not been tested, or is this option not suitable for use?

Yes, just yet there was no need to improve in this. I regularly use PDF-XChange and for me it's a great option so far, everything suits me. But today, out of principle, I will install and add an article :)

As it turned out, Master PDF Editor opens PDF files more correctly in Linux. The native viewer is just terrible, its only plus is simplicity.

Portable Document Format – PDF is one of the popular and widely used file systems for emailing, sharing, and printing documents. For basic editing, you may need to install a suitable Linux pdf editor because Linux does not come with a default pdf editor. There are lots of options available when the question comes to editing pdf in Linux but the choice is very limited if you compare with adobe acrobat for windows and MacOS. That’s why here I have reviewed both free open source and paid Linux pdf editor for fulfilling the requirement of advanced and basic options.

Linux PDF Editor: Top 15 Reviewed

While writing the article, I have tested all the and as this site is on basically Ubuntu, so here I will be sharing the install method for . But all those Linux pdf editors are similarly applicable for other Linux derivatives.

Is a professional vector graphics editor for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It's free and open source and used by graphic design professionals all over the world. If you are a graphics designer and need to edit any pdf documents, just don't go anywhere. Inkscape can also do the task of pdf editing. It can import the pdf files and let you edit that accurately.

Method 1: Install Inkscape on Ubuntu via PPA

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:inkscape.dev/stable sudo apt update sudo apt install inkscape

Uninstall Inkscape From Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install inkscape

Method 2: Inkscape Snap Package

Snap install inkscape

Is one of the best free and open source pdf. This Ubuntu pdf editor provides a set of tools for editing pdf documents in a limited way. It will fulfill your limited and basic documents editing mostly .

Is completely free and open source pdf editor for KDE system. It also comes with basic pdf editing features. Most mentionable features are inline notes, freehand line drawing, stamp, pop-ups notes, highlighter etc.

Is the most popular and featured rich commercial Linux pdf editor available in the market. You can do almost everything ranging from creating and editing a pdf file to signature handling and editing scanned documents. It provides a wide range of features including add or edit text, images, notes into the pdf documents, offers powerful annotation tools, ability to edit pdf forms etc.

Though Master PDF Editor is a proprietary application, still you can do some basic task by using the free version. But digital signatures, encryption, and watermarks are not available in the free version.

Is a simple but powerful application which is a GUI for the PDF Toolkit (PDFtk). It can add backgrounds, stamps, or edit the PDF info, or dump the form data in a PDF etc.

Though is a publishing software for Windows, Linux, and macOS, still you can edit pdf files with it. Scribus supports basic pdf editing like create PDF files, lists, add controls and other form features. With the help of Scribus, you can make animated and interactive pdf documents.

Method 1: Install Scribus on Ubuntu via PPA

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:scribus/ppa sudo apt update sudo apt install scribus

Method 2: Download Stable Branch

Is a simple and easy to use Linux pdf editor available out there. It’s a python-gtk software which helps you to split or merge pdf documents and rotate, crop and rearrange the pages using an intuitive and interactive GUI.

9. GIMP

Method 1: Install Gimp on Ubuntu via CLI

sudo apt-get install gimp

Is not a full-fledged software but browser-based pdf editing tool. So you don’t need to download or install anything, just drag your pdf files “Drop Here” section, upload and you can create PDF files, add annotation and set the password to protect a PDF file.

Is more like Linux pdf viewer than a full-fledged pdf editor. It comes with inbuilt on Gnome desktop environment and supports PDF, tiff, XPS, Postscript and many more. It has many features including document indexing and printing, search tools, encrypted document viewing, and many more.

Method 1: Install on Ubuntu via CLI

sudo apt-get install evince

Method 2: Download from official site

Is a multiplatform pdf viewer and editing tools for all the major OS including Linux, Windows, and macOS. It's a fast, secure and easy to use Linux pdf editor which offers some basic pdf editing tools.

Is one of the best open source pdf editors like LibreOffice Draw. You can use it for both Linux pdf editor and viewer. It supports all the major OS platforms like Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can insert images, text forms field and more using this open-source PDF editor.

Is a free and open-source pdf editor and viewer for Linux. This Linux pdf editor is based on QT3.x that offers a GUI. You can add text, images into pdf files, and also can delete any particular section of information.

15. PDFsam–PDF Split and Merge

Is also a free and open-source pdf editor for Windows, Mac, Linux and any other operating system that supports Java. It provides some basic tools for editing pdf documents like PDF split, merges, mixes, extract pages and rotates PDF files.

There are lots of Linux pdf editors available in the market including free and paid version. If you just want basic editing features, you can use one of the free and open-source pdf editors or be an advanced user, just grab a commercial version which offers featured rich editing capabilities.

Did we miss any important and amazing Linux PDF Editor in this list? Please feel free to suggest any open source pdf editor that you know and we will enlist that in the content soon.

Note: For clarification, these applications are not listed in any specific order and the features mentioned here are not all-inclusive. The features mentioned are compiled either from their respective official websites or from my personal experience using them.