Now. Why am I wrong for Libre
this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2025
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Are there any good free pdf editors anyway? Iβve always had to use a premium product in the end π
LibreOffice Draw is the best in my experience. I edit a lot of pdfs for work and was tired of using an online solution which gave you two free document edits per hour. This was often enough but sometimes it wasn't, and that was annoying. So I tried four or five different offline software solutions for it, and I settled on LibreOffice Draw.
Yeah, similar experience, Iβve also settled on draw. Works fine enough π€·ββοΈ
Sometimes I use my organizationβs ms and adobe products and I just get a little ui envyβ¦
Edit(sometimes I have to)
i mean, pdf's shouldn't be edited. that's the point of pdfs.
Iβll let everyone know
i really wish i could.
If pdfs weren't supposed to be edited, they shouldn't have mistakes that require editing.
They also should've saved the source files that they were created from, but don't worry this PDF dates back 20 years and 3 of the people who maintained its annual updates have since retired, the last person who maintained it left the company on bad terms so good luck!
this is why everything should be in plain text until it has been finalized
I'm sure they thought it was finalized when they put it out.
then complain
Why, when it takes like a second to just fix it and I don't even know who made it?
because pdfs aren't made to be edited and any edit can fuck up the file permanently
editable pdfs would like a word
non-standard extension. should die in a fire.
That word is "bloat".
It's a file on my computer, I'll do with it whatever I want.
then convert it to a proper format until you're ready. editing a pdf is like decompiling and editing an exe file.
What program do you use to convert PDFs, what format do you convert them into for editing?
pdf is a compiled format for typeset text, so you need a pdf compiler. i use latex + tectonic. pandoc is also a popular alternative. "converting for editing" is like decompiling a program, you're not guaranteed to get the same thing back as was put in. i never do that, i recompile instead. if i need text from a pdf i use pdftotext and cross my fingers because the formatting ain't coming back out. any program that does replicate formatting just does a best guess.
I'm not sure if I'm following you - a compiler can be used to edit an existing PDF?
no, you can't edit an existing pdf, the nonstandard form filling extension notwithstanding. you can extract as much information as possible from it and recreate it. that's what "pdf editors" are doing. and since it's not officially supported, any edit can screw the file up.
the reason you can't just edit it is that pdf is basically a container for program code that runs on printers. so you can have text interspersed with formatting information, or text with non-existent characters approximated by vector images, or text that's been rendered to a raster image and is not actually in the document. then you have the fact that pdf can embed specialized fonts, compressed files, security measures, and even internal programs. and it's all offset-based in there so you need to modify the entire file structure in order to get it working again after adding text. what's worse, since any file with a pdf document in it is a valid pdf document according to the spec, less reputable "pdf editors" can just embed whatever shit they want. it's a common malware vector.
it's much safer to re-build the document from source. if you don't have the source, there are tools to extract just the textual content.
Ok, this definitely helps in understanding how PDF works. However, I really do edit PDFs regularly and have no problems with the edited ones. Already mentioned it ITT, PDF-Xchange lets me do so many things that listing them would sound like an advertisement. Editing the existing text tends to mess it up, that's true, but it's not crucial for me and all sorts of other actions work almost perfectly.
You're imagining some very ideal circumstances for working with PDFs that have nothing to do with my own needs, so I can't really make use of your advice. :/
in what circumstance does pdf editing come up regularly?
Banking is very PDF heavy, and many of these PDFs have a ton of logic baked into them. Some of the loan documents do literally all of the math for you so the loan officer just inputs the amount, term and APR and the PDF outputs a fully-filled loan document. Its pretty magical to see until you peek under the hood at the code and oh-my-god-what-the-hell-how-did-this-ever-work-in-the-first-place-this-must-be-purgatory
yeah fun fact that's usually an embedded javascript runtime
yet another reason for it to die in a fire
I frequently download book and journal article PDFs, scan books myself, and upload them online. And ofc read them.
Editing the PDFs in my case includes e.g. adding the outline/bookmarks that allow for easier navigation, adding OCR, cropping, splitting and rearranging the pages when the scanned images aren't ideal, removing watermarks...
that sounds like actual typesetting work! i'm very surprised that you don't get access to the source. usually when uploading to a journal they want the latex source.
I'm not uploading to a journal. I upload stuff e.g. to Internet Archive. When I download stuff from various databases (journals, academic repositories, Google Books), it ranges from recent publications to stuff from several centuries ago, in which case a scan is all you can get.
so in that case i'm guessing it's mostly just pdfs as containers for a series of images. that's frustrating. there should really be a better format for that kind of thing. cbz is the simplest i can think of but that doesn't really allow the same amount of metadata.
Inkscape can also kinda work depending on the PDF? I think libreoffice tends to be better still because inkscape treats text from an imported PDF weirdly iirc
I've yet to find one. Pdf24 is free but not Foss and decent for certain tasks, but it's not a great editor. After using the paid version of xchange for as long as I have, using free options just leaves me disappointed.
What's kind of weird is that there seems to be no other program coming close to Xchange's range. I've tried a bunch of them and they're basically toys compared to it. There evidently is some demand, but just one company meeting it fully? Is editing PDFs particularly technically difficult?
And the one company won't release a Linux version either. Sure, Wine exists, but it's not nearly as good as native support.
No clue how complicated PDFs, with all of its different versions are. Especially if some software make PDFs that don't even comply with official spec (not sure how often happens though).
Try to open a text PDF with LibreOffice and you might see why is so difficult to work with them. You can find that all the text is spread in one field for each line, not a unique text box.
PDF Xchange Editor is cool. Thanks to it I haven't had a need for Adobe software on my PC in years.
It doesn't have every tool but I've been self hosting Stirling PDF and it suits most of my needs.