Yeah but it’s pretty limited and personally I could never get it to work, it couldn’t handle larger files. Had to pirate some other program to do anything serious.
LibreOffice Draw is the best in my experience. I edit a lot of pdfs for work and was tired of using an online solution which gave you two free document edits per hour. This was often enough but sometimes it wasn’t, and that was annoying. So I tried four or five different offline software solutions for it, and I settled on LibreOffice Draw.
Inkscape can also kinda work depending on the PDF? I think libreoffice tends to be better still because inkscape treats text from an imported PDF weirdly iirc
I’ve yet to find one. Pdf24 is free but not Foss and decent for certain tasks, but it’s not a great editor. After using the paid version of xchange for as long as I have, using free options just leaves me disappointed.
What’s kind of weird is that there seems to be no other program coming close to Xchange’s range. I’ve tried a bunch of them and they’re basically toys compared to it. There evidently is some demand, but just one company meeting it fully? Is editing PDFs particularly technically difficult?
Try to open a text PDF with LibreOffice and you might see why is so difficult to work with them. You can find that all the text is spread in one field for each line, not a unique text box.
And the one company won’t release a Linux version either. Sure, Wine exists, but it’s not nearly as good as native support.
No clue how complicated PDFs, with all of its different versions are. Especially if some software make PDFs that don’t even comply with official spec (not sure how often happens though).
pdf is a compiled format for typeset text, so you need a pdf compiler. i use latex + tectonic. pandoc is also a popular alternative. “converting for editing” is like decompiling a program, you’re not guaranteed to get the same thing back as was put in. i never do that, i recompile instead. if i need text from a pdf i use pdftotext and cross my fingers because the formatting ain’t coming back out. any program that does replicate formatting just does a best guess.
It’s got way too many features like 3d rendering. It’s proprietary. Simple things like copy and paste from a paper with columns does not work and is basically an unsolved AI problem.
Like, it mostly renders the same, but fonts, OCR, etc are different between viewers, and the official Adobe reader/acrobat are totally enshittified with AI that they don’t work anymore.
Have you ever tried to look under the hood and interact with a pdf programmatically? I assure you it only gets worse.
A while ago I tried to write a small script to scrape data out of some account statements that my idiot bank only made available in pdf format. As far as I could tell, the file was just a list of tiny chunks of text along with sets of x/y coordinates specifying where each one should be placed on the page. Answering seemingly simple questions like “are these two words on the same line?” Involved comparing raw y-coordinates because the file had no concept of a “line of text”, and even spaces between words were often simulated by bumping the x-coordinate over by a few pixels instead of using an actual space character.
I suspect those files were generated by a particularly bad piece of software, and a more competent one could probably do much better, but knowing that its even possible to create a file that cursed is still infuriating to me.
Yup that’s how PDFs are. I think the accessibility option one might have something (never tried parsing that).
Plus if you’re working with language with diacritics then it’s even worse because you can’t even compare the coordinates properly, specially if some of them go beyond the previous characters. Not having the space combined with that meant it was really hard to determine the text, and it saves glyph from the font instead of character info too.
Yeah, don’t try to hand-parse a raw PDF. You’re better off rendering it and running OCR on the image in most cases. Only exception I know of is if you generated it with LaTeX.
Yeah, using vector graphics on PDF because you can zoom in and you get into that problem. For big drawings I just look at 100% zoom, otherwise if there’s too many lines on small drawings I just make a png instead.
Yes. Might depend on how the PDF was saved or if it’s protected, but it can open and export PDF format. Gimp can too, however that would be really more graphics editing as doing text is cumbersome.
Gimp is really bad with exporting large PDFs. Like 60 pages and it crashed my 16gb ram laptop because it ran out of memory after like spending at least an hour.
You can edit PDFs on libre?
You can in libreoffice draw for sure.
Yeah but it’s pretty limited and personally I could never get it to work, it couldn’t handle larger files. Had to pirate some other program to do anything serious.
Are there any good free pdf editors anyway? I’ve always had to use a premium product in the end 😔
LibreOffice Draw is the best in my experience. I edit a lot of pdfs for work and was tired of using an online solution which gave you two free document edits per hour. This was often enough but sometimes it wasn’t, and that was annoying. So I tried four or five different offline software solutions for it, and I settled on LibreOffice Draw.
Yeah, similar experience, I’ve also settled on draw. Works fine enough 🤷♀️
Sometimes I use my organization’s ms and adobe products and I just get a little ui envy…
Edit(sometimes I have to)
It doesn’t have every tool but I’ve been self hosting Stirling PDF and it suits most of my needs.
Inkscape can also kinda work depending on the PDF? I think libreoffice tends to be better still because inkscape treats text from an imported PDF weirdly iirc
I’ve yet to find one. Pdf24 is free but not Foss and decent for certain tasks, but it’s not a great editor. After using the paid version of xchange for as long as I have, using free options just leaves me disappointed.
What’s kind of weird is that there seems to be no other program coming close to Xchange’s range. I’ve tried a bunch of them and they’re basically toys compared to it. There evidently is some demand, but just one company meeting it fully? Is editing PDFs particularly technically difficult?
Try to open a text PDF with LibreOffice and you might see why is so difficult to work with them. You can find that all the text is spread in one field for each line, not a unique text box.
And the one company won’t release a Linux version either. Sure, Wine exists, but it’s not nearly as good as native support.
No clue how complicated PDFs, with all of its different versions are. Especially if some software make PDFs that don’t even comply with official spec (not sure how often happens though).
PDF Xchange Editor is cool. Thanks to it I haven’t had a need for Adobe software on my PC in years.
i mean, pdf’s shouldn’t be edited. that’s the point of pdfs.
If pdfs weren’t supposed to be edited, they shouldn’t have mistakes that require editing.
this is why everything should be in plain text until it has been finalized
I’m sure they thought it was finalized when they put it out.
then complain
I’ll let everyone know
i really wish i could.
editable pdfs would like a word
non-standard extension. should die in a fire.
That word is “bloat”.
It’s a file on my computer, I’ll do with it whatever I want.
then convert it to a proper format until you’re ready. editing a pdf is like decompiling and editing an exe file.
What program do you use to convert PDFs, what format do you convert them into for editing?
pdf is a compiled format for typeset text, so you need a pdf compiler. i use latex + tectonic. pandoc is also a popular alternative. “converting for editing” is like decompiling a program, you’re not guaranteed to get the same thing back as was put in. i never do that, i recompile instead. if i need text from a pdf i use pdftotext and cross my fingers because the formatting ain’t coming back out. any program that does replicate formatting just does a best guess.
How is pdf the standard also?
It’s got way too many features like 3d rendering. It’s proprietary. Simple things like copy and paste from a paper with columns does not work and is basically an unsolved AI problem.
Like, it mostly renders the same, but fonts, OCR, etc are different between viewers, and the official Adobe reader/acrobat are totally enshittified with AI that they don’t work anymore.
Have you ever tried to look under the hood and interact with a pdf programmatically? I assure you it only gets worse.
A while ago I tried to write a small script to scrape data out of some account statements that my idiot bank only made available in pdf format. As far as I could tell, the file was just a list of tiny chunks of text along with sets of x/y coordinates specifying where each one should be placed on the page. Answering seemingly simple questions like “are these two words on the same line?” Involved comparing raw y-coordinates because the file had no concept of a “line of text”, and even spaces between words were often simulated by bumping the x-coordinate over by a few pixels instead of using an actual space character.
I suspect those files were generated by a particularly bad piece of software, and a more competent one could probably do much better, but knowing that its even possible to create a file that cursed is still infuriating to me.
Yup that’s how PDFs are. I think the accessibility option one might have something (never tried parsing that).
Plus if you’re working with language with diacritics then it’s even worse because you can’t even compare the coordinates properly, specially if some of them go beyond the previous characters. Not having the space combined with that meant it was really hard to determine the text, and it saves glyph from the font instead of character info too.
Yeah, don’t try to hand-parse a raw PDF. You’re better off rendering it and running OCR on the image in most cases. Only exception I know of is if you generated it with LaTeX.
Probably Crystal Reports. It’s cursed.
Yes, I have looked at evil and I have not been back.
Also, the entire web stack, the entire history of email, Javascript - the horrors of the universe just happen
At least you can play doom in a pdf.
https://github.com/ading2210/doompdf
Huh, GitHub is down.
Been working on local stuff all morning.
Now just need to connect it to a Samsung Smart fridge.
I hate how it deals with lines in chart grids where it looks like different lines are bolded depending on your zoom level
Yeah, using vector graphics on PDF because you can zoom in and you get into that problem. For big drawings I just look at 100% zoom, otherwise if there’s too many lines on small drawings I just make a png instead.
That’s an app issue I think. Preview on macOS renders very well, but macOS and postscript/pdf go back a long long way.
You can edit pdf in firefox lol
Yes. Might depend on how the PDF was saved or if it’s protected, but it can open and export PDF format. Gimp can too, however that would be really more graphics editing as doing text is cumbersome.
Gimp is really bad with exporting large PDFs. Like 60 pages and it crashed my 16gb ram laptop because it ran out of memory after like spending at least an hour.
To be fare, you can open PDF in Word and it converts it to editable docx