The BEST PDF TOOLS for Linux: merge, edit, create, annotate, OCR...

hey everyone this is Nick and I previously complained that the default tools to interact with PDFs are very lacklust to their own Linux they generally can't edit a document to remove pages merge PDFs together or even sign a PDF so today we'll be looking at tools you can install that solve all these problems and more just like today's sponsor can solve your remote desktop problems this video is sponsored by Chasm and more specifically they are open source VNC server called Chasm VNC this thing is a game changer if you want to connect remotely to a desktop to a server or to an application it uses less bandwidth it has higher frame rates and better quality than traditional VNC tools thanks to a better compression algorithm it lets you copy and paste seamlessly between devices it has improved security over the base VNC protocol and it's very configurable and best of all you don't need any client software you can use it straight from your web browser from anywhere it has packages for a wide variety of distros it works on arm and it supports GPU acceleration as well if you need to connect remotely to one of your computers give Chasm VNC a try I don't think you can get a smoother experience the links are in the description below so on every distro by default you generally just get a PDF viewer and that's it on gnome it's the most basic of tools all it does is show you the document printed fill forms and add bookmarks that's it no signature no changing the page order no removing Pages or adding new ones nothing and sure the PDF format was never meant to be edited but sometimes you still have to do it on KDE ocular does a lot more but it's still not a complete PDF tool it lets you fill in forms add annotations and even digitally sign a PDF if you're knowledgeable enough to other signing certificate yourself but there's no modifying page order editing the document removing Pages or more so these tools are pretty limited if you're used to the built-in PDF tool of Mac OS you're probably wondering what the hell these programs are doing and so we're going to look at ways to handle everything you might need for PDF documents and so let's begin with something the PDF file format was never designed to handle editing and one tool that is probably already on your Linux desktop that can do this is Library office draw it can open PDF documents and edit them as long as it's not an image if the text is correctly identified as text then you'll be able to modify it you can move lines or Graphics around change the background of a document and generally just modify it to your liking it does have issues though first text will often be split into lines which means you're not editing a paragraph you're editing each line of text individually which isn't optimal it will also often mess up the layout of the PDF if it's a complex one so it's definitely not the best tool if you have major complex edits to do on a complex PDF document if you're familiar with Vector drawing programs then inkscape can also edit PDF documents although it won't be your traditional text editing workflow inkscape isn't designed for text-based documents so it might be clumsy it also had issues with ligatures in certain fonts not displaying all the characters correctly and this leads us to the sad realization that for modifying a PDF document open source tools just don't cut it you'll have to turn to proprietary commercial Alternatives fortunately there are a few those include PDF Studio Master PDF and foxit PDF editor they all have free versions except for foxit which only has a free trial but these three versions are super limited and generally don't let you edit the actual text or images they just let you do mind the things like watermarks annotations filling in forms nothing you can't do on the default tools that genome KDE or any other desktop environment provides so you will have to pay to get access to their editing features now there's also WPS as office it's also not open source but it's a pretty powerful office suite and includes a PDF editor if you pay for the full version master PDF and PDF Studio are a one-time payment at about 80 rows for the former and 100 euros for the latter and fox it and WPS are subscription based at 80 bucks a year and 40 euros a year respectively so if what you need is a complete Suite to edit PDF documents then your only real route is using one of these commercial proprietary tools you have to accept to use non-open Source programs and you have to Shell out some cash but at least you have that option if you're okay with just minor edits and fixing typos and correcting layouts then LibreOffice draw or inkscape will do the trick nicely now let's talk about signing a PDF document and most of the time the only thing you really need is stamping an image signature on top of a PDF and ocular can actually do that you can use the manual drawing tool to write your signature or you can add the ability to paste an image on top of a document but it's convoluted you have to go to settings toolbars shown enable the quick annotations toolbar then click the configure button in that toolbar click add select the type stamp and click the little button next to the stamp symbol field to pick your own hand-drawn signature that you previously saved as an image and afterwards you can just add that to any document in one click from that quick annotations toolbar you can also open the PDF document in LibreOffice draw or the and add your image signature this way and you can also open the PDF document in xernel plus plus which will let you draw your signature on top of the PDF using a stylus or your finger or your mouse and yeah sure you might argue that this is not digitally signing a document but look in 12 years working at various companies from the biggest ones to startups we never once used digital signature using your certificate all was required is just applying your little scribbles on top of the PDF so either you did it manually or you just copy pasted an image that's enough for 99 of use cases still if you need to really digitally sign a PDF the easiest way is to use LibreOffice open delivery office suite click file then digital signatures and then sign existing PDF the document will open in read-only mode and you have a signed document button at the top it will list all the available existing signatures and certificates you have installed on your device and you can pick the one you want and now you might be wondering how do I actually add a digital certificate or what it even is and basically digitally signing a PDF for a document requires adding a little key on top of that document so the receiver of that document can actually identify that it's really you that signed it and not anyone else and this is done through a certificate which is issued either by your own organization or by a certification Authority much like for a website by default LibreOffice will look into Mozilla firefox's certificates list so you'll have to put your certificate file there to do so open Firefox then the main menu preferences privacy and security and then view certificates then click on authorities and import and then the OK button and you're done you can also add other directories for Library office to look for certificates in by clicking the tools menu in library office then options going to the security Tab and clicking the certificate button there you can add any other path you want where your certificate file is stored this probably will not be useful to most of you it's more meant for companies that actually need to prove that they sign something contractually but hey if you need that now you know how to do it ocular can also do that and it looks into the same Firefox certificate store and a few other preset directories to sign a document using ocular click the tools menu then digitally sign and you'll be able to pick the signature you want to add now if all you want to do is OCR optical character recognition which is basically just extracting text from an image or a PDF that has no selectable text then you also have plenty of options on Linux the simplest one is G image reader an open source app that will let you import a document or image and will recognize all the text inside in a very large variety of languages it can take a while to do its thing but it works reliably and it was able to extract text from scanned PDFs and images like a PNG you have plenty of options to preserve paragraphs to reduce white space and edit the detected text including find and replace tools and you can just copy and paste it to any other program you would like it's a very easy solution although I didn't write myself with handwriting because I was almost a doctor and my handwriting is accordingly terrible now if you prefer doing these tasks from the command line then you have Tesseract OCR which is actually what G image reader uses in the background you can set any option you'd like to get the text you want and since it's using the command line you can pipe that output to a text document automatically or run it on all the contents of a folder so all your scanned PDFs automatically get transcribed into text inside of new documents it's a pretty handy choice if you have a ton of PDF documents and you need to transcribe them to text quickly now if what you want is to annotate PDF documents manually like for example with a stylus then your best option is probably xerno plus plus it lets you open PDF documents and draw all over them you can highlight text add hand-drawn notes shapes you can type some text and it can even handle layers to quickly mask all that hand-drawn stuff and view the original document it can even handle equations and graphs and has a very customizable interface oh and you can also record audio and play it back from your notes it's probably the best tool you can find if you're a student that needs to do some handwritten notes on top of PDF provided courses if you can find Linux Hardware that actually lets you use styluses stylive who cares if you can find the hardware it's cool if all you need is modifying the pages in a PDF document like reordering them or deleting them then you have PDF arranger a simple gnome app that will run on any Linux desktop and is available on flat Hub it lets you rearrange the page order by simple drag and drop and you can delete pages using the right click menu or the delete key you can import another document to merge PDFs together and you can rotate Pages change the format of each page crop the white borders copy and paste Pages wherever you want and Export the final document as one PDF or individual documents for each page it is a great and simple app that I use all the time to interact with PDF documents and finally creating a PDF document is very easy on Linux you don't need a dedicated PDF tool you can just create your document in LibreOffice writer or Draw or calc on only office whatever you want and then export that to a PDF document it's super simple and it doesn't necessitate a tutorial or specific application it's part of the Native capabilities of almost every program that handles documents and at least you don't need to add a fake PDF printer to your system like on certain other operating systems now if you're looking for something more akin to InDesign to create your PDFs your best alternative on Linux is scribers I'm not saying it's a full alternative to InDesign but you'll get the same general workflow with the ability to freely Place elements on a canvas align them to various guides have paragraphs that flow from one page to the other it's a pretty powerful application if you need to create layout heavy documents it's also available on flat Hub now creating PDFs has never really been an issue on Linux or if I'm honest on most other operating systems either so that's about it for PDF basically can handle anything using open source apps except for actually editing the existing contents of a PDF which can be done using Library office or inkscape but it's not really perfect if you need a more robust solution for that there are proprietary commercial Solutions available as well working with PDFs has been a very frustrating thing for me to do on Linux and by researching this video I basically solved all my problems so I hope the video did the same thing for you just like today's sponsor will fix your Hardware problems on Linux tuxedo offers computers with Linux pre-installed and the reason why you might want that instead of buying a Windows computer and hoping that your favorite distribution runs well on it is because they ship Hardware that has been selected to run specifically well with Linux you can pick from a selection of popular distros when you buy your device you can configure virtually every aspect of it including your own logo on the back or your own keyboard layout on your laptop and all their laptops are openable repairable upgradable you can replace the battery the SSD the RAM and sometimes even the wireless card so if you need a new computer stop looking at Windows devices click the link in the description below and buy something from tuxedo their computers are really great for Linux so thanks everyone for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it if you did don't hesitate to like to subscribe to turn on notifications or to write a comment and if you didn't like it well the dislike button is still there and you can also tell me why in the comments as well and if you really enjoy the channel and you want to support it there are tons of links in the description below for liberape PayPal patreon YouTube memberships YouTube things whatever you know the drill so thanks for watching and I guess you'll see me in the next one bye thank you [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: The Linux Experiment

Views: 73,901

Keywords: linux, linux help, linux tutorial, linux 2023, linux tips, linux for beginners 2023, linux tutorial 2023, linux pdf reader, linux pdf ocr, linux pdf annotation, linux pdf tools, edit pdf linux, merge pdf linux, sign pdf linux, best pdf linux, how to sign pdf file with digital signature, how to sign pdf document on laptop, how to sign pdf file, best pdf editor, how to edit pdf, linux pdf editor, pdf editor free, how to edit pdf file, how to edit pdf for free

Id: ie7Jb1KiIBM

Length: 15min 40sec (940 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 05 2023