Ask HN: How is there not a full-featured open-source PDF editor/viewer?

9 points by escaper 7 years ago | 12 comments

For almost anything you can think of there is a pretty awesome open source version of that software but for the life of me I can't find a truly full featured PDF editor that's 100% free. As PDF technology has been the preferred document of business for the last 15+ years I'm really surprised there isn't at least one open source project that's been a mainstay in this niche?!? What am I missing?

wizzerking 7 years ago |

FRom https://opensource.com/alternatives/adobe-acrobat

Ah, this is where things start to get tricky. Or at least where they used to. The world has changed a bit and it turns out that recent versions of LibreOffice Draw do a fantastic job of editing PDF files, and not just adding and deleting pages as you might expect, but for editing text and images as well (so long as your PDF was created directly from a source document and not from a scan). It's not perfect, and I've had it choke up on a few more complex documents, but I'm still impressed with what a good job it does on many of the documents I've had to work with.

Inkscape, too, does a good job with opening documents created elsewhere, and may be a more intuitive choice if your document is heavy on graphics. There are standalone tools as well, like the GPLv2 licensed PDFedit, but I've had such good luck with Inkscape and LibreOffice that I haven't had to use a separate editor in recent years. So there are FOSS PDF editors, and LibreOffice certainly allows you to export to PDF virtually everything

escaper 7 years ago | |

Yeah that's sort of the article that lead me to post here- like I tried to say in my title, there's not really a true "full featured" PDF editor/viewer that does everything.

There doesn't seem to be a GIMP to Photoshop type of product for PDF as far as I've seen.

cl42 7 years ago | |

Curious if you know how Inkscape and Draw compare to Scribus, which is what I've used in the past. I've had trouble using Scribus for editing PDFs recently (poor quality importing?), so this is so nice to see.

newnewpdro 7 years ago |

The last few times I've had to edit a PDF I used xournal.

I haven't used any proprietary tools on other systems to compare, but maybe it's satisfactory. It's worked fine for what I've needed to do.

kgwxd 7 years ago |

What would you want it to do? Aren't PDFs usually created from non-PDF sources? I imagine it would basically recreate Word.

escaper 7 years ago | |

I'm not even asking for that much really- split, merge, compress, convert from various formats, rearrange pages, work decent with e-signatures, and have options to create interactive fields. I've used quite a few of the "free trial" software from the big names and it's astonishing to me that there isn't an open source project that can accomplish all of this.

new_guy 7 years ago |

Because you've not written it yet? :p

escaper 7 years ago | |

Ha, if only! Perhaps my post will inspire a few brilliant programmers here!

SQL2219 7 years ago |

I think there is some issue with licensing from Adobe on this. Someone who knows more than me might educate us.

Someone 7 years ago | |

The standards related to PDF are open. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF:

”PDF was standardized as an open format, ISO 32000, in 2008, and no longer requires any royalties for its implementation”

Also, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF#Intellectual_property:

”Anyone may create applications that can read and write PDF files without having to pay royalties to Adobe Systems; Adobe holds patents to PDF, but licenses them for royalty-free use in developing software complying with its PDF specification.”

It’s a huge spec, though. For example, fully supporting PDF requires a JavaScript engine.

tonyedgecombe 7 years ago | | |

and half a dozen image formats, font formats, bits of PostScript, I think there is even some XML lurking in there.

Loranubi 7 years ago |

On Windows I use Sumatra PDF which is a great viewer. It uses the MuPDF library.