I am working on an open source & free PDF editor for Mac, called PEP (PDF Editing Program). It will be a lightweight alternative for Adobe Acrobat. The website and the project are unfinished, I am. #2 To Formulate Pro – Best Open Source PDF Editor for Mac The Formulate Pro is the second on the list but, it is the best PDF editing program that is available for Mac Operating System. It is one of the best things that will work perfectly fine with Mac’s elegant looks.
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2021-03-25 17:26:46 • Filed to: Knowledge of PDF • Proven solutions
An Open Source PDF Editor for Windows, Mac & Linux Posted by salubrium October 1, 2009 May 29, 2010 4 Comments on An Open Source PDF Editor for Windows, Mac & Linux I have previous written about PDF Editors for Windows and Linux here and here, so this is, in effect Part 3. LibreOffice is a free and powerful office suite, as well as an open-source PDF editor.
The world is moving towards going paperless, and the era of online document editing has arrived. In the age of the Internet, there is huge competition among open source PDF editors. Everyone is looking for the best open source PDF editor online, and there are many options for software available. However, they all have their drawbacks as well. Let's discuss some of the best open-source PDF editors available online, along with the pros and cons of each one.
Top 5 Open Source PDF Editors for Windows
1. LibreOffice Draw PDF editor
LibreOffice is a strong competitor in the world of PDF editing. It is free and open-source software, much like MS Office. It's a good option for people who can't use proprietary software. It has all the built-in features of an efficient open-source PDF editor. LibreOffice is a leading alternative to Microsoft Office, though it does have an inconsistent interface.
Pros:
- It allows for easy editing of PDF files.
- You can add or delete pages.
- It also allows for editing text and images.
- It allows file conversion support.
- Provide for exporting and importing.
- A digital signing feature is available.
Cons:
- Does not have a user-friendly interface
- Has confusing menu options
- No cloud options
- It can be inconsistent with original and backup files.
- Does not allow for direct email to windows live mail
- Contains difficulty in compatibility and file types
2. InkScape
Inkscape is much like its competitors but preferred because of its strong performance and wide range of features. It uses Vector Graphics to edit PDF files. As a free Open Source PDF editor for Windows, you can download it to perform all the basic tasks of a full PDF reader and open source PDF editor. It contains full functions such as removing or adding text or images. The best thing is that you can use its portable version without having to install it.
Pros:
- Allows exporting to PNG format
- Contains a friendly user interface
- Entirely free to use
- Lightweight software that doesn't use up too much space during installation
- Allows for easy editing of graphics
Cons:
- Similar to other options on the market
- It lags or crashes on many PCs.
- Slightly slow and unintuitive
- Does not have all the required tools
3. PDFedit
PDFedit is a widely used tool. It has all the benefits of a free and open-source PDF editor software. It can be used as a PDF reader and also includes functions of a PDF editor. The user can detect exactly which sections, words, or phrases they want to edit. It can also be used to add text and images into a PDF file. It also allows the functionality to delete information from the file.
Pros:
- Lightweight for installation
- Multi-platform support
- Includes tools for personalization
- Allows for conversion of files
- Has many more advanced options available
- Password protection is also available.
Cons:
- Some of the tools have technical difficulties.
- Still in beta
- Some features do not work or
- show error messages
4. Apache OpenOffice Draw
Apache OpenOffice Draw is popular due to its high quality. It can easily be used as both a PDF reader and an open-source PDF editor. Many features can be found in this software, such as customizing PDF pages, saving them in different available file formats, removing or inserting any text and importing and exporting features, etc.
Pros:
- A great variety of features
- Multiple platform compatibility
- Allows for easy creation of basic charts
- Provides features for spell checking
Cons:
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- The user interface looks out of date.
- Excel users face problems due to their functions.
- It is slow to start up.
- There are errors being identified on some windows versions.
- It can be slow while processing large documents.
5. PDFSam
PDFSam basic is a PDF file editor that supports merging, splitting, and editing of PDF files. It is also an open-source PDF editor. If you would like to edit or re-arrange the order of pages in a PDF file, this program is worth a try. It is a java application and can run on any device that has Java runtime.
Pros:
- Supports visual organization
- Allows for re-ordering of PDF pages
- User can mix and merge pages
- Contains tools for extracting or splitting pages
- Allows for rotating and saving one or multiple pages
Cons:
- The visual document composer shows errors
- Requires Java
- A bit difficult to learn for beginners
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Shortcomings of Open Source PDF Editors
- Many can be unreliable
- They involve higher installation costs
- There are no guaranteed updates
- They offer very basic functionalities
- They don't offer any proper support
- They don't work efficiently with all hardware
- There is no guarantee of a continued service
A Better Choice than Using an Open-Source PDF Editor
Instead of using an open-source PDF editor, PDFelement can come to the rescue as a PDF file editing solution that is fully loaded with professional and easy to use tools that allow you to edit, combine, transform and organize PDFs with ease. PDFelement can be used for:
- Create fill-able and editable forms
- Edit PDF files as you desired with ease.
- Convert PDF files to Word, PPT, Excel, and more
- Convert common file types to PDF
- Perform OCR on scanned PDF files
- Add bookmarks to your PDF files
- Add text boxes and sticky notes to your PDF file
- Protect your file with password restrictions
- OptimizePDF file size with ease and much more
Free Download or Buy PDFelement right now!
Free Download or Buy PDFelement right now!
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An Open Source PDF Editor for Windows, Mac & Linux
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The author have previously written about PDF Editors for Windows and Linux here and here, so this is, in effect Part 3.
Open Source Pdf Creator
He had used OpenOffice PDF Import Extension, PDFEdit and numerous other tools listed in my first posts but nothing works as well as the latest Inkscape. It has one downside though, right now. That is, you can only edit one page at a time. (It’s not useless beyond one page but it’s certainly more difficult because you have to rejoin them together.)
So here’s a random PDF I found by googling for random PDF ;). Here’s a shot of the first page in my PDF Viewer (evince).
Now we open Inkscape click File -> Open and you will see the following dialogue box where we can choose which page to import.
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Now you can see that the page imported perfectly into Inkscape and objects are editable.
and finally, here’s our slightly edited, more up-to-date version.
A few other tips.
Inkscape won’t import encrypted PDF’s. To get around this you can use pdftops .pdf which turns the PDF into a Postscript file. You can then use ps2pdf .ps to return the file back into an unencrypted pdf.
On Linux, you can print to PDF automatically. On Windows, you will want to have installed a PDF Printer, like PDFCreator and on Mac OSX, read this tutorial about setting up a free PDF printer.
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If you need to merge multiple PDF’s into a single PDF, there is a nice tool called PDFtk that can do that for you which is available for Windows, MacOSX and Linux.
If you can’t edit the text, it is saved as a picture.
Incscape works really well for importing graphics within a pdf. Much better than open Office at this stage. Unique fonts are garbled but I think there may be an option to import them as the most similar font. Thanks for the article!
June 22, 2012 at 5:51 am
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