PDF is not a format designed for editing. It’s an export format designed to be a middle ground between a word processor and a printer.
You can bastardise extra layers onto it, but that’s about it.
Just so yall know, Firefox added a pdf editor.
Inkscape, which is free and open source, does a very competent job of taking part .pdfs and allowing you to modify them these days.
Firefox just added PDF editing to the native browser!
*opens issue on opensource bugtracker demanding propietary features for free*
“I can’t believe the devs haven’t implemented this yet!”
*doesn’t donate a cent*
It is always morally correct to pirate Adobe.
I had adobe Photoshop pirated for a while, butsomehow it shadow updated and adobe took away my access to using Photoshop without paying for it. That was for the most recent version of Photoshop. I guess adobe found out how to stop people from cracking the .exe.
There are a lot of great replacements for Adobe programs. If you’re going to spend money, maybe try them out and then donate to the ones you like!
GIMP or Kita for video editing are solid, DaVinci Resolve is an excellent video editor, and now browsers like Firefox can edit PDFs! Adobe should get bent with their insane fees.
I’ve found the free editors, including Firefoxs, will often treat an Adobe/AutoCad made PDF as a flat single image. Everything has been merged together. Adobe was the only thing that would let me still treat every line and box and text as individual.
Any suggestions?
There are alternatives, fortunately. If you need to do a lot of editing, Nitro is pretty good. You can pay about $15 a month for it, or pay a one time cost of like $180 and have a lifetime license. If you don’t like Nitro, there’s plenty of others.
What pisses me off is that Adobe marketing has people locked in with that “Pro Tools” mindset. So many gullible dumbasses think if you don’t use Adobe (or Pro Tools) you just can’t be taken seriously, and you don’t have a “real, professional tool”. I think that is less true today than it used to be, but it’s still out there.
(Meanwhile if you need a Pro Tools alternative, Reaper is the fucking bomb.)
Wish Reaper was intuitive like Garageband. I need to take like a weekend crash course to understand the basics.
PDFs are kind of nice. but ideally we, as a society, took a wrong turn somewhere when we opted for complex proprietary bloated filetypes that nobody can understand or use.
Firefox
Libreoffice Draw
Gnome Document Viewer
You can now edit PDFs on Firefox
Or a handful of other, open source applications
Only thing more pirated than Windows products are Adobe products. Smallest violin, etc etc
I use various apps for editing PDFs.
- Firefox for quick and small edits
- Xournal++ for typing and drawing over the document to make a new document
- LibreOffice Draw, also for the above
Just switched to Linux and this is one thing I haven’t found a good solution for yet.
My only real use case is the “fill and sign” features in Adobe Reader. That allows filling with text boxes wherever I want and importing my actual handwritten signature which looks indistinguishable from print > sign > scanned.
Check this: https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF
Since you are on Linux just Start it in a Docker container locally and you are golden :)
I do love me some docker. I’ll check it out. Thanks.
