Editing PDF files on Ubuntu
From Crashcourse Wiki
Contents |
[edit] What's this about?
All I want to do, on my 64-bit Ubuntu system, is be able to make simple editing changes and add annotations/sticky notes to PDF files. A quick Google search promises that there are numerous utilities to do this but testing inevitably reveals some sort of quirk or annoyance or limitation, so I just want to summarize what I found.
Here's a good place to start for Ubuntu: How can I highlight PDFs?
[edit] [Commercial] Qoppa Software
Start with a commercial product that's available on a trial basis: Qoppa's PDF Studio. A very quick test shows that it seems to work so we'll just file that away for future reference.
[edit] evince
That Ubuntu page suggests that a suitably new version of evince will allow editing of PDF files, but while the version of evince that comes with Ubuntu 10.10 appears to be new enough (at least 2.32), it appears that it requires a version of poppler that needs to be compiled from the git repo. For that reason, I'm going to disqualify evince as a candidate for PDF editing, at least for now.
[edit] OpenOffice and PDFImport
While a number of web pages claim that OpenOffice supports editing PDF files, the actual documentation page makes it clear that this extension has significant limitations:
"Documents with more sophisticated layouts, such as those created with professional Desktop Publishing applications that use special fonts and complex vector graphics are not suitable for the PDF Import Extension. Similarly, longer documents (> 20 pages) may cause some performance and stability problems."
In addition, I tried to open a simple PDF file using this extension and got an immediate read error. So, for now, scratch this as a possibility.
