PDF Tools
Simon Scholz2020-10-092 min readFeedback / Requests?

Editing Tools for PDF files

  • Xournal++
  • LibreOffice Draw
  • Inkscape
  • Gimp
  • and many more ...

It also depends on the PDF file itself whether one of these tools properly visualizes the original PDF file. So depending on the PDF files you might choose one tool over another. Recently I've been using Inkscape, because LibreOffice Draw tends to screw the text alignment of a PDF files sometimes. A drawback of using Inkscape is that it is only capable to open one page at a time. So in case you want to modify several pages with Inkscape, you'll have to do it one by one and use tools like PDF Arranger to merge the resulting PDFs afterwards again. Since many forms have between 2 or 3 pages it might be worth the effort.

Xournal++

Xournal++ is an open-source and cross-platform note-taking software that is fast, flexible, and functional. A modern rewrite and a more feature-rich version of the wonderful Xournal program.

You can also easily modify and create PDF files with it.

Also see comprehensive GitHub Page: https://xournalpp.github.io/

Install Xournal++

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:apandada1/xournalpp-stable
sudo apt update
sudo apt install xournalpp

Also see xournalpp installation

Inkscape

Install Inkscape

sudo apt install inkscape

PDF Arranger

Install PDF Arranger

sudo apt install pdfarranger

Merge several PDFs into one

Open PDF Arranger, press the + button, choose the pdfs, which should be merged, arrange them and then save one single pdf.

Decrease size of PDF files

Ghostscript can be used to do several things with PDF files. For example also decreasing its' size.

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook \
-dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=output.pdf input.pdf

More details can be found here: https://www.ghostscript.com/doc/current/VectorDevices.htm#PSPDF_IN

Sources