Linux PDF editors
 

What Linux PDF editors (not viewers) do you use? Do you have particular recommendations? I've found "PDFedit" but not much else. I don't need to edit PDFs often but when I do, I must switch to Windows. I'd like to do so in Linux.

Pretty much any linux word processing program should work...I use Abiword. Open office also works well. There are others. Be aware, though, that most of the word processing programs do not like to open .pdfs. You may have to copy the text from your original .pdf into open office/other, and save two copies: one .pdf, and one native format, for later editing.

Are you sure
 

bcwagne: OpenOffice can edit PDF? I don't find that function anywhere in OO. Are you sure?

Yes, there is a new plugin for openoffice.

Also consider pdftk.

A few commercial tools are also available in Linux

Other than abiword and pdftk.....does anyone else know of Linux pdf editors (that could be installed via synaptic)?

FYI:
http://www.oooninja.com/2008/06/pdf-...ension-30.html

Did you bother to google for it?
from google

Did you bother to search LQ for this (you will find suggestions from me to the exact same question in old LQ threads)?
from LQ

I tried
 

I tried google with little luck...perhaps I did a bad search...but I should have looked into older threads...thanks for the reminder.

Is there a plugin
 

I just installed abiword...but I don't see anything in its menu regarding PDF editing. Is there a plugin it requires? I did a quick google but couldn't find much. What a really need is something that will let me

a) convert one data format (word, spreadsheet, webpage, etc) into PDF
b) merge PDF documents and rearrange the order in PDF with multiple pages
c) if I could "type in text" in a PDF that would be great too, but it wouldn't be required

I have the Adobe pdf maker for Windows. I doubt there is anything as comprehensive as that for linux but that is how I meet my current PDF demands.

I am trying to find pdftk on my k menu...I installed it too. Maybe I overlooked it.

If you think you are going to edit a PDF like you do a document in Word or abiword, you are mistaken. There is no "formatting" in a PDF. It already rendered, and only gives locations where images and text is stored within boundaries. When you inserted text, all text is not re-"flowed", rather the best that you get is text squishing to allow room in the current chunk. PDF was NEVER designed to be edited in this fashion. The process from doc -> PDF is not a reversible one completely.

That does help
 

Thank you. That does help somewhat. I suspected I would not be able to edit a pdf as I would a word document, spreadsheet, etc. What about simple tasks such as merging pdf, rearranging pages in a pdf, etc? If I could get away with that, then it would suffice.

Re-ordering pages and merging is no problem - PDFs are page oriented.

I've been using Acrobat for a long time, and it is a simple drag-n-drop operation. I'm sure the free PDF readers/writers do likewise.

PDFEdit? Why don't you use Synaptic? Just look under Edit > Search and type in any term that is of interest to you.

It's a CLI application. Try man pdftk.

I use pdftex. And I always keep the ASCII text version and tex files handy.